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Always important to get rid of waste, if we can.
This morning Thatcherite think tank “Conservative Way Forward” has a report out on how we can save taxpayers millions by “ending waste and division”.
Defunding Politically Motivated Campaigns first calculates that the sector is spending £30m on EDI staff. I make that a whopping 0.13 per cent of the sector’s spend on staff - a large chunk of which is funded by private sources who demand this kind of work.
Also included in its headline savings are Office for Students access and participation plans, which it argues are pushing higher education institutions towards introducing “politically motivated measures” like “decolonising the curriculum” and signing up to the Race Equality Charter.
Under the subhead “Over 250 higher education access and participation plans - £2.5 billion on race equality charters and decolonisation” we get some examples of universities that have signed up to the REC or who are pursuing curriculum change.
What it doesn’t say is that about £1.5bn of that £2.5bn is going on student financial support, and £1bn is going on access.
If its researchers had spent more than 30 seconds looking at the source of the figure they nicked from a John Blake speech, they’d know that the investment commitment figures in the APPs he was quoting from don’t actually include money to be spent on student success measures.
And anyway, thanks to the government’s loan repayment reforms, the actual cost to government of this stuff (as opposed to graduates) is between 6 per cent and 33 per cent, depending on the discount rate used.
Every little helps, I suppose.