Who got the government’s 10,000 extra student numbers?

The announcement is the conclusion of the Department for Education (DfE)’s bidding round for places – it ran a metrics-based threshold for “quality” based on retention and employability data, and eligible universities – in all nations of the UK – submitted bids for the additional places. All eligible bids were accepted – and although the bids for healthcare places exceeded the 5,000 limit (in the end all 5,611 were approved) the bid for places in strategically important subjects only amounted to 3,859, well short of the 5,000 limit.

So, is this policy success or policy failure? You could view this as a test-run for the imposition of stricter number controls based on quality thresholds. Failure to meet the projected numbers could be seen as a problem, with the outcome being less additional human capital and skills. Or it could be argued that the public can now be more confident that only “high quality” providers are able to deliver these courses. You could also argue that when the government said “go ahead and step up to the plate”, the bit of the sector that was allowed to has somehow not quite managed to fill its boots.

Whichever way you view it, in any other year the notion of “extra” places would be a fiction – it’s only the existence of the student number cap (2020-21 forecast plus five per cent) that creates the possibility of extra places. You could argue that the policy failure here is with universities for asking for the cap in the first place, given they could have in theory delivered these additional places at any time in the last eight years. There’s also the small matter of whether students will be recruited to those places, which remains to be seen.

And given that we have totals by subject and totals by provider (but not totals by subject and provider, if you see what I mean) what we can’t really judge meaningfully is whether these places are any in way “extra”.

If Grittleton Institute of HE got 150 extra engineering places in this exercise, what’s to stop it now recruiting 140 extra English students and claiming it was only planning to recruit 10 until now? If, when we get to the autumn, we can’t see 3,500 more of these “good value” enrolments in these providers than we had last year, presumably there will be trouble. By then that might be the least of DfE’s worries.