Coming up with higher education policy ideas is – frankly – pretty easy.
Sure, if you want to be an elitist gatekeeper about it, coming up with good policy ideas (which I’m going to go ahead and define as a policy that has the potential to achieve a stated long-term aim and offer wider benefits) is quite a lot harder.
But the true test of a policy idea is whether you could actually do it. Implementation: a plausible route to turning your idea (whatever it is) into something that can and will actually happen, is the real work. Everything else is basically a social media post.
Poetry, prose, and memes
Arguably, the Reform UK ascendency has peaked. The high point of opinion polling was around about October last year – a “ceiling” of around 30 per cent. Just before the local and devolved elections Reform were nearer 25 per cent, which in general election terms is the difference between an 80+ seat majority and hung parliament territory.
The exact reasons for this are unclear. One plausible argument suggests that as Reform moves from the politics of complaint – great for an insurgent opposition looking to score political points – to the politics of policy and implementation, it loses support. It is a tale as old as time: critiques of the government of the day are attractive and resonant, policy proposals and policy delivery are at best the subject of these critiques, and at worst the dull day-to-day technical stuff that only nerds care about. Like on Wonkhe.
Before this crop of elections Reform UK had been running 10 councils. It is, by all accounts, terrible at doing so. The rhetoric about fixing potholes, driving down immigration, slashing tax, and cutting waste has very much foundered on the practicalities of running services and maintaining infrastructure that people rely on with an inadequate budget and heavily constrained devolved powers. Around 70 (depending on how you count it) elected Reform councillors are no longer councillors – true, some of these have been exposed as having staggeringly unpopular opinions even by Reform standards and been deselected, but the main trend has been a reaction to a disconnect between the language of campaigning and the language of government.
The case of higher education
At a national level, the rhetoric remains one of grievance – centering on immigration and the “war on woke” – something that even declining immigration, tough-talking from the government, and a reduced salience for progressive ideas has been unable to stem.
Reform’s higher education policy has generally been a continuation of this theme of grievance. I offer you a part of Suella Braverman’s first speech as “shadow” education spokesperson, presented during one of Farage’s press conferences in February of this year:
“Meanwhile, too many of our universities are failing our young people. Today, 700,000 graduates are unemployed. Each of them carrying on average £50,000 worth of student debt. The truth is that too many of our young people have been sold a lie about university, wasting three years of their lives on Mickey Mouse courses. All while we have a chronic shortage of nurses, builders, and care workers. The system is broken.
So, I tell you what we need. Instead of Tony Blair’s 50 per cent of young people going to university, this is what we need. We need Nigel Farage’s 50 per cent of young people going into the trades.
That’s what will produce the next generation of carpenters, electricians, and technicians that our country is crying out for all to work in a thriving manufacturing sector. Now, these are not lesser callings. These are noble professions. And these will be the people who rebuild Britain. They won’t just rebuild our infrastructure. They will rebuild our confidence and our national self-belief.
And to those universities that have descended into hotbeds of cancel culture, anti-semitism, and which survive really thanks to the cash of foreign students and keep conning young people into worthless degrees. Reform is putting you on notice.
The higher education policies in the devolved manifestos take this as a starting point, but build in the effects of considered lobbying and the beginnings of a consciousness of the actual public impact of some of this thinking.
In Wales, the recognition that “universities are central to Wales’ economic future” and a promise to put the sector on a sustainable financial footing mesh uneasily with a reduction of opportunity (using the language of “value for money”) and the imposition of England’s failed free speech regime.
Scotland got a condensed version of this which is worth quoting in full:
Undertake a comprehensive review of our University funding to ensure degrees are meaningful, value-for-money and grounded in genuine academic merit rather than EDI or sustainability metrics
And we probably need to address the idea of a ban on foreign nationals (defined as those who are not British citizens – so the policy would exclude those with settled status or indefinite leave to remain) accessing student loans.
Writing in the Telegraph, Suella Braverman mashes up critiques of the growth of overseas students (those who pay non-UK fees at a much higher rate) with the much smaller group of people claiming home student fee and maintenance loans who have already been assessed as long-term UK residents (having lived and worked in the UK for at least 5 years, or as the partner or child of someone who has) in good standing by the Home Office.
From announcement to actuality
While these ideas, and the ideologies behind them, are very visible in UK political discourse it needs to be remembered that none of them have actually happened. These are policy announcements in very broad terms, and have yet to face the test of implementation.
In his book What happens if Reform wins? The Times’ journalist Peter Chappell offers a “non-fiction thriller” that deals entirely with these tests: focused almost exclusively on Reform’s better known policies on immigration, net zero, and the license fee. It follows the ideas already expressed by Reform spokespeople and outriders over the parliamentary, legislative, and implementation hurdles that stand in their way.
One of the main examples Chappell offers as a barrier is a need for primary legislation. It is a big shift from an announceable policy that gets lots of Facebook likes to actually making laws that do the thing you are intending to. Even established parties get this wrong a surprising amount, and the willingness to retreat, regroup, and redraft is a rare attribute. This challenge goes into hard mode if you are a minority administration (or propped up by a politically unstable constitution), have a lot of inexperienced politicians as MPs who may be tempted to rebel against a party that treats them as lobby fodder, and – in Westminster – have next to no allies in the House of Lords.
Higher education and the university sector – beyond a nod to Matt Goodwin’s chances of becoming universities minister, and the suggestion that fees will rise – don’t really get a mention in the book: which is a shame, as policy here offers a perfect case study in the difference between policy and complaint. I’ve attempted to remedy this deficiency below.
Value for money and graduate jobs
The ancient clarion call of the “Mickey Mouse degree” is a commonplace in critiques of higher education – defining it in a way that would allow action to be taken is much harder. The previous Conservative administration made numerous attempts to use data on graduate employment and earnings to draw a line that would mark certain courses as useless or undesirable – beyond an utterly arbitrary decision to defund the practical elements of media studies, there was no policy action as a result.
A part of the difficulty comes with defining value. Suella Braverman got herself into trouble with a critique of “golf course management” and “surfing” degrees: both courses that are highly vocational in nature and lead to defined employment opportunities in two key UK growth industries. Similar sallies against media and creative degrees are rebuffed similarly: the scale of these areas of the economy suggest that there is at least some demand among employers for skills in these trades.
Less common are critiques of generic degrees in subjects like English literature, history, and sociology. A part of this feels like classism – these are the courses that dominated when the UK had an elite higher education system that served the well-to-do five percent of the population that went to university. These are courses that may not offer day-one job ready skills, but do provide the broader “graduate” offer of experience in research, in making arguments for a course of action, and of the capacity for innovation.
And there is also the issue of salary and the “graduate job”. The former experiences an impact from the prevailing practices of industries and employers, the place in the UK a graduate works, and from social capital – an impact at least as profound as the choice of provider. The latter is – in regulatory terms at least – based on a (mis)reading of standard occupational coding that is based on data at least a decade old and fails to capture the changing demands of the modern workplace.
As we’ve been over on the site before lines like this cannot be easily drawn using available data. It really is a “vibes” thing, and as such your first implementation step would be a consultation. If there are generally courses aimed at employer needs that are not needed by employers these would need to be identified by the employers and professional bodies involved. It’s not difficult to bring an economic impact into discussions like this, so you could expect accompanying headlines to be dominated by the billions that would be cut from the economy.
If we imagine that some compromise could be forced through, the next stage would be to make courses in certain subjects at certain providers ineligible for state funding. Currently an OfS registered provider can offer courses in any subject area it wishes, unless there is a specific condition of registration that provides otherwise – applying these conditions based on ministerial diktat also opens the question of what to do if (when?) circumstances or a change of government alters the rules. Capacity, once lost, is not easily replaced.
And this is all assuming the OfS could do this on ministerial direction the Higher Education and Research Act (HERA2017) specifically forbids (section 6) from getting the regulator to “prohibit… the provision of a particular course of study”, while the next section (section 7) forbids ministers from asking for action on specific providers. Section 10 subsection 7b directly prohibits differential fee levels based on areas of study or research. All this can only be replaced via new primary legislation.
Access to fee loans
There’s two proposals in play here – the removal of student loan eligibility from applications without British citizenship, and a minimum entry qualification requirement.
The first is really a matter of immigration policy rather than higher education policy: if you have already been granted indefinite leave to remain this comes alongside a range of rights that, for most purposes, are equivalent to those of British citizens. You will have been granted ILR following an assessment (for which you would have to have paid a fee) carried out by the Home Office – and, as of 2025, additional requirements are proposed. You will also be eligible to apply for British citizenship from one year after being granted ILR, after you pay a further fee.
The majority of people in the UK with ILR achieved it via the EU settlement scheme – around 4.4m by the end of September 2025, with a further 1.1m holding presettled status, as compared to around 800,00 non-EU citizens. In the past, EU citizens would have access to UK fee loans as a part of the terms of EU membership, with reciprocal benefits for UK citizens working or studying in other EU countries. Removing rights from EU citizens would invalidate the withdrawal agreement, potentially with knock-on impacts on everything from trade to mutual recognition of professional qualifications.
The idea of a minimum entry requirement (MER) was proposed by the last Conservative government, and got as far as a consultation that took place in 2022. The proposals were for either a grade 4 or above in GCSE English or Maths, or two E grades at A level – but 84 per cent of respondents were against the idea in principle – citing the potential for discrimination against underrepresented groups (62 per cent) and institutional autonomy (39 per cent) as key reasons. There was very slightly more support for the two Es at A level plans, and even those who agreed wanted to expand eligibility to other, equivalent, qualifications.
These are two ideas which, though superficially attractive to those concerned about abstract issues, are likely to be less popular when the impacts are considered. Demographically, the number of 18 year olds will be falling from around the time of the next election: the challenge would be to ensure that we have enough people with the higher level skills needed to participate in a modern economy. This would necessarily include non-traditional groups of students – including mature students – who are disproportionately more likely to have their participation prevented by a MER.
In both cases the route to restriction is initially straightforward – you would do it via an amendment to the venerable Education (Student Support) Regulations 2011, a relic from the days of the Teaching and Higher Education Act 1998. Section 22 of the latter is the primary legislation in question – the powers granted to ministers to make regulations are vast.
You would imagine that there would be a judicial review brought of either decision, as both plans remove rights from individuals. The fact that this is being done via a statutory instrument will not help matters for the government here. The decision to act here would depend on how much money a Reform government thinks it would save here, and how badly it wants to pick a legal fight on this particular issue.
EDI and free speech
A notable moment in the long campaign in Wales was the students who ran the Debating Society at Bangor University declining to invite Reform MP for Runcorn and Helsby Sarah Pochin to offer something that was not a debate (a “question and answer session”) to members, after she had written to offer this. This engendered the perfectly normal response of a threat to defund the university entirely from Reform treasurer Richard Tice, and the promise of a law allowing this to happen (in the form of a fine or a restriction of access to state funding).
This, by the time we got to the manifesto, had become a straight translation of the England-only Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) Act (including the since-scrapped statutory tort) – previously Reform advisors like James Orr had assumed that this applied to Wales anyway – plus a line to suggest that “universities who curtail open debate will not be rewarded with public funding.”
In recent weeks the high court judgement on the University of Sussex case has demonstrated that the “absolutist” position on freedom of speech is not backed up by the law as it currently stands, and there needs to be a proportionality condition attached to any assessment of whether or not freedom of speech duties have been breached where this has been done in order to prevent harassment or for another legitimate reason. Now, there is nothing to suggest that Reform UK couldn’t go full Trump and simply change the law to suit, but this – again – would require primary legislation.
You’ll recall that the passage of HE(FOS) was long (on some reckonings the longest period between a bill being introduced and passed in Westminster history), for reasons linked to terrible drafting and a huge range of opinions among elected members and Lords. Thinking back to watching the whole thing, the margin by which it eventually passed felt like the margin by which it was felt by legislators to be addressing a genuine problem rather than being promulgated for ideological reasons. Reform, given comments about what happened Bangor and elsewhere, is unlikely to be accorded that same benefit.
The EDI policies are imports from the US – we can look at the Trump administration to see how these may play out. The closest analogue is badly done EDI – mostly about optics and impressions than actual tangible change. Comments about activity like decolonisation or inclusivity do not start from an understanding about what such activity actually entails or the tangible and measurable benefits they can bring, but from the worst possible interpretation of what an extreme version of such policies would mean.
Anti-EDI interventions can have real world impacts, of course – action against net zero or further restrictions on transgender rights would cause lasting damage beyond the “own the libs” starting point. But looking purely from an impact on the higher education sector, stipulations around funding eligibility would require re-writing HERA via new primary legislation, and while general political pressure would be painful and divisive, the only way that the government could realistically compel or not compel providers to do things would take us far closer to nationalisation than most of the political right would be comfortable with.
The 18-21 route to employment
Farage’s fifty per cent of young people who will enter the building trade will need to be trained. They will need to find jobs, and build the kind of sustainable career that mitigates against the inevitable health impact of physically challenging labour. None of this is straightforward. Currently around 10-14 per cent of working age adults work in construction, and while there is always demand for builders there is not really much in the way of evidence that demand would grow to the levels that the Reform plans might suggest.
We are, as a nation, struggling to build at the moment. The main reasons are problems with sourcing raw materials and planning restrictions. Fixing the former requires international collaboration – exactly the opposite of what Reform-esque parties around the world have achieved; fixing the latter requires battling against local opposition to expansion, with wins achieved at the expense of local unpopularity. The availability of apprentice bricklayers doesn’t really come into it.
Countless surveys of employers demonstrate that the skills that employers are actually looking for, and the skills that will do most to drive economic growth, are at a higher level. “Getting building again” requires legal expertise, logistics and trade experience, competent planning and utilities provision investment, raising capital – and that’s before you factor in the health, education, and social support functions that enable people to work. If we want to get back into petro-chemicals, it’s graduates we need. Most of these skills are at level four or above. A nostalgic focus on “the trades” goes against national and economic needs – reforms to the education system that would operationalise that (including cuts to university places) are the opposite to what employers are asking for.
We also have to ask about aspiration. Overwhelmingly, parents (many of whom have attended university themselves) want to see their children attend higher education. While the salary premium may not be as big – and will drop further given the growth of franchise provision and sub-degree courses – courses at universities represent pathways to desirable careers and a better overall quality of life. It would be a brave party that chose to limit that opportunity, especially in an environment where the number of UK domiciled applicants is already expected to drop sharply due to demographic trends.
What would young people denied a higher education place do instead? We don’t have great data on this (due to problems with the ONS Labour Force Survey) but youth (16-24) unemployment has risen in recent years to more than 15 per cent. It is unlikely that there are jobs available for current young people outside of education, expanding that pool would just lead to a higher young unemployment rate: and initial unemployment tends to lead to longer term worklessness.
The simple update to the 2011 regulations that I mentioned above is only the start – there would also need to be substantial investment in other forms of training and job creation. These are initiatives that would take time to build, and would only really start showing results after the end of the next parliament. And while Reform historically has had little interest in young people as voters – as those denied a good start in life age they are unlikely to consider a vote for the party that didn’t let them pursue their dream.
The next five years
With any political party, cheap and popular policy wins are more attractive than expensive and difficult changes. Arguably this is a structural problem with the way we do politics, but it also ensures that poorly considered policies that would have significant detrimental effects are difficult to implement.
Very little of what Reform proposed across the UK is cheap in the long term. A lot of it will cause a great deal of short term pain for an (at best) hugely uncertain long-term benefit. And while things like this can become law with a sizable majority, less stable forms of government of the type that a 30 per cent vote ceiling suggests require compromise – be that on an overall policy direction or simply to pass a law. Political consensus requires the assumption of good faith, and a focus on deliberately contentious policies mitigates against that.
While Reform may be down on higher education that is, and is likely to remain a minority position. But a passive acceptance that universities are probably a good thing isn’t going to do much good either – and we are very short on political will to address any of the problems that the sector is facing. Avoiding a Reform win means dodging attempts to actively make higher education worse: but where are the parties standing on a promise to make it great again?
