Since the election, I’ve seen numerous posts querying why it matters that Angela Rayner, who’s now Deputy PM, studied an NVQ part time as a young parent.
Others have queried the relevance of Bridget Philipson the new Secretary of State for Education having received free school meals and the Educational Maintenance Allowance.
Lived experience matters when it comes to understanding the challenges and delivering policy that shapes the lives of people.
It is by no means impossible to be a great Secretary of State for Health whilst choosing to use private healthcare yourself – but the fact that Wes Streeting owes his life to the NHS treatment he received for kidney cancer gives him both the firsthand knowledge and the passion for his mission to fix it.
And whilst you can be a great Security Minister without a firsthand knowledge of defence, Dan Jarvis’ deployments in Kosovo, Sierra Leone and Iraq mean that his knowledge of effective defence is practical and not just theoretical at this time of ever increasing global instability.
Living it
As has been widely reported, research from the Sutton Trust shows the new Cabinet contains only one minister who went to a Private School – or just 4 per cent of its membership compared to the 63 per cent under Sunak (or indeed the 32 per cent) under both Blair and Brown the last time Labour was in power.
A lower proportion too than the 16 per cent of Vice Chancellors that were privately educated.
And whilst just 7 per cent of our children in England are educated in private schools – 24.6% of pupils are in receipt of free school meals.
Is it not therefore right and incredibly important that for the first time in the history of our country the cabinet has more members that represent the lived experience of the 24.6% of our children than the 7 per cent?
A shining example of the importance of social mobility and widening access.
With Lord Wharton’s departure already announced as the Office for Students Chair, it seems unlikely that his successor will have the same privately educated background.
The significance of an Access and Participation Plan may seem all the more pertinent to a ministerial team, and indeed any future Chair of a regulator, if they benefited from the kind of measures contained within them.
And whilst the finances of individual institutions are clearly of concern, it seems unlikely that the government won’t seek to address the ever dwindling levels of both priority and finance that was placed on collaborative services like Uni Connect in the last parliament.
Value and values
Looking back through the past 14 years of Conservative government, universities haven’t always been maligned in the same way they have over the past few years.
The likes of Justine Greening, David Willetts and indeed Jo Johnson, were all passionate about higher education and understood its value and were powerful advocates for the sector.
For me personally the change came with Gove’s comments that “I think the people in this country have had enough of experts” – followed by calls to crack down on “Harry Potter degrees”, decrying “Mickey Mouse courses” and the government wearing the 25 per cent fall in international student visas as a badge of honour.
In a “war on woke”, higher education was on the front line. That is why it was so refreshing to hear the new Secretary of State for Education state that universities are “a public good, not a political battleground, we will not denigrate them”, and for Lisa Nandy to declare that the “era of culture wars is over.”
This more positive approach to universities is driven by a ministerial team, and indeed a wider incoming group of Labour MPs, which has a far more detailed knowledge of higher education than its predecessors. Having studied at a broad range of institutions and with many having served as SU officers, this Labour administration know first hand how university governance works, and the crucial role our sector plays in both driving growth and improving life chances.
Back in 2005, the leader of Labour Students in NUS, Wes Streeting, and myself as Chair of Labour Students, used to regularly meet with the Higher Education Minister, Bill Rammell. In our first meeting Bill told us that he had been President of Cardiff Students’ Union.
This was a fact that Wes and I of course knew well, but an important signal that Bill understood what it was like to be on our side of the table and that whilst we often disagreed, it was always a robust debate driven by mutual respect.
Similarly as Jacqui Smith takes on the skills and universities brief, we see someone who understands the role of universities in the health service, having recently served as Chair of NHS trusts, with practical experience of vocational education as a teacher in a 6th Form College and with first hand knowledge of the student movement as a former National Secretary of Labour Students.
She of course also has experience as a Schools Minister under Blair and the review of her from the teaching unions at the time was that “she talked to us on our level” – after the past few years a minister who will do that is surely what the higher education sector needs and deserves.
So how can the sector make the most of this moment and a new intake of both MP’s and Ministers with a far different class and education background to their predecessors? We must face the reality that universities are far from priority number one.
Therefore rather than sitting back and waiting to be saved, we must instead make ourselves integral to what comes next – not just to the aspiration to “break down barriers to opportunity” but to all five missions of this new Government.
Higher education has played a vital role in shaping the paths of this new class of politicians – this is now our moment to demonstrate that as a sector we are ready and able to play our part in addressing the broader challenges our country now faces.
