Foreign Perspectives

Archive for the ‘Politics’ Category

The mechanics of UK government are a little peculiar in the period between governments.

This morning Gordon Brown finally asked the Queen to dissolve parliament so that the election period could begin. In practice, of course, the process of government continues but with the small problem that no major decisions can be taken because there’s technically nobody in charge for the next four weeks. Thus the civil service continues to run the country as it always has done but can’t head off at a tangent and needs to be mindful that a different party could (probably will) be in charge next month and thereby acquires in effect a veto power that ordinarily it wouldn’t have.

In that no-mans land period the various parties should be finding themselves kept somewhat more informed as to what’s actually happening within the government machinery. After all, if/when the new lot take charge it’s an overnight change of power unlike the more laid back timetable of the American changes of administration. In effect, the changeover of the administration or rather the preparations for a potential change of administration begins today. Let’s hope that no really big decisions need to be taken in the next four weeks!

The first fruits of that have already been noticed with the arrival of the security protection for the conservative leadership team and, behind the scenes, confidential briefings. There’ll be more, of course, in the weeks to come. After all, labour no longer form the government and so in this interim period there needs to be a balance since the former labour ministers should no longer have the advantage of having the trappings of government if those aren’t similarly on offer to the former opposition party too.

So what next? Expect the annoying arrival of party political broadcasts on our screens and politicians on our doorsteps and a massive increase in junk mail from them all.

I’m generally a message in a bottle kind of person as far as political activism goes rather than being that proactive with firing off letters to all and sundry as Wendy tends to do.

However, I thought that I’d drop the new Open University vice-chancellor, Martin Bean, a line about my thoughts on some rather undesireable side-effects of the ELQ fiasco. Specifically, the dropping of all but one of the science summer schools and the associated dropping of all the crop of named science degrees.

The summer schools have been a fixture of many Open University degrees from the very start. They’re the time when one feels like a “real” student for a week. They’re the time when one has the chance to get together with a whole heap of fellow students for all kinds of activities (ranging from serious study to, sometimes, the less high-minded student activities). They’re the time that one sees the Open University in the flesh.

The snag is that whilst up until a number of years ago the summer schools were an integral part of the regular courses, they were almost all separated off five or ten years ago as courses were rewritten. Thus whilst the original S100 science foundation course included a summer school, the updated S104 doesn’t and instead there’s a separate course made up entirely of the former summer school. That has the consequence that the summer school is now optional and therefore almost impossible to get a sponsor to pay for it and so many fewer people do the summer schools these days.

To add to the problems, the current proposal is to implement these changes over the next couple of years. That would be fast enough in a normal university where degrees typically span three or at most four years. In “OU-time”, it’s incredibly rapid as degrees can take anything from six to as many as eleven years even without breaks between courses. Thus even people who are well through their degree can be affected. One of those on the forum who’s almost at the end of her degree has already been forced into doing one of the summer schools a year or two “too soon” because it seems unlikely that the final summer school that she needs will be replaced after it expires. She’s one of the lucky ones: many of those at the start of their degrees will find that they can’t complete the degree they were aiming for as the required summer schools (and perhaps other courses) will long since have been cancelled by the time they’d be doing them.

Anyway, Martin tells me that he will be raising the issue fairly soon. I’m sure that this issue and other ELQ related ones will make his time an “interesting” one.

I was going to say that I was surprised to receive a personal reply from him the day after I sent my little missive but actually I’m not. It’s just what one would expect from the Open University vice chancellor and it’s good to see that he’s already taken the “open” part onboard.

Unfortunately, Martin Bean has been appointed in what seem sure to be “interesting times” for the OU thanks to the ELQ funding fiasco that’s going to start hitting them particularly hard quite soon.

Sadly, there seems to be little that can be done whilst the current government is in power but at least that seems sure to change soon. However, it may not change soon enough to avoid significant damage being done throughout the higher education sector.

Although the timescale for the implementation of the ELQ policy seems relatively relaxed for most universities, for the OU it’s incredibly rapid. Remember that in the OU most degrees take six or seven years to complete and can take as long as 11 years, even without taking breaks between courses. Thus a change that kicks in within just two or three years can easily derail a lot of people aiming for a particular degree.

Thus, the proposals of the science faculty to eliminate all of their current range of named degrees seems sure to hit an awful lot of students who’ve already started on their degree programme. However, let’s not forget the very large number of people who browse through the OU courses and mull over the issue for a number of years before finally starting their degree. I’m sure that I’m not the only one who watched the Saturday morning OU broadcasts of many years ago (stopped only a few years ago) and thought that they’d quite like to do a degree in this or that at some point.

Even more unfortunate is that the OU are attracting a much larger number of school leavers than in years past and many of them would like to have the degree options in the OU that are available in normal universities.

But perhaps the saddest thing of all is that the elimination of the named science degrees would be accompanied by an elimination of the summer schools associated with the various named degrees. Their argument that few people do the named degrees because of the requirement to do a set number of summer schools seems to come from a particularly short memory. The named degrees were introduced at around the same time as the separation of the summer schools from the courses which they were previously an integral part of. That separation means that it’s MUCH more difficult for those with any kind of sponsorship to get funding for what then became an optional course in the eyes of sponsors.
What’s perhaps the most unfortunate thing in all this is that it could all be avoided if we were each prepared to pay £1.50 PER YEAR in extra tax.

The more I read about the ELQ debate, the crazier it seems to become.

At the moment, I’m actually exempt from what might be crazy increases in university fees as I live in Northern Ireland which is one of the minor exemptions in the grand scale of things. Sounds great to not apply the charge to the whole of Northern Ireland but seeing as we represent about 1/40th of the UK population it’s not such a big deal as it first sounds. That said, I can’t see that exemption staying forever so I was curious about what other exemptions that I might be able to avail of should the need arise in subsequent years.

First up are foundation degrees however the problem with most (all?) of those is that you need your employer to sponsor you and they’re in a fairly limited range of fields at the moment too. That said, several of the courses in my current plan are within foundation degrees. Why then should someone hit by ELQ have to pay, say, double the cost for doing a course when someone else doing the very same course and with the very same prior qualifications be paying half as much? No reason really apart from the crazy nature of the ELQ funding debate.

Although it seems impossible to get a fully definitive list of the exemptions this does include certain medical subjects, youth studies and social work which creates some loopholes for me. Psychology isn’t exempt from ELQ but the majority of psych courses that I’ll be doing over the next couple of years can be allocated against a Diploma in Health Sciences which is presumably exempt and most of them can go towards a youth worker or social work qualification too. Incidently, note that the SIRV (Strategically Important and Vulnerable Subjects) subjects aren’t exempt from ELQ.

What the regulations don’t appear to even consider is that students don’t always have to be studying towards a specific degree. That’s much more apparent in the case of the Open University but it also applies in many universities. As far as I know one could allocate courses against an exempt qualification (or series of them if necessary) in most universities right up to the penultimate year; in the case of the OU it would be possible to do this right up to the end of the final course. What happens then if someone “changes” their mind at the last minute and picks up the qualification that they really wanted all along? There’s quite a substantial difference in funding (around £4k for non-ELQ, perhaps £16k for ELQ) so I’d have thought that a lot of people would be looking into this possibility.

Overall, it sounds very much like a Gordon Brown “savings” plan ie saves lots of money on paper but in reality it just adds to administration costs and doesn’t save anything at all.

The first time I came across ELQ (Equivalent and Lower Qualifications) was a year or two back when it was mentioned in one of the rare rallying cry type emails that come out from the Open University. What’s it all about? Well, basically the government are intending to drastically reduce funding to universities for those students who are studying for a qualification that is equal to or lower than one that they’ve already got. For example, if you already have a BA or BSc degree then if you sign up for another BA or BSc degree, even if it’s in a totally different subject, then you come under the ELQ rule.

In practical terms, the number of ELQ students is fairly low in most mainstream universities but it’s quite a different matter for the OU where many people start on a different degree for leisure purposes (the proportion of retired students is pretty high on some courses), to change career or to acquire a degree in a more relevant subject to their existing job. Thus, something that would largely have affected the night classes run by mainstream universities is going to affect the main business of the OU. Ironically it would appear that an excellent institution created by the Labour party way back in 1969 may well be killed off by the Labour party of 2009.

So how significant is this reduction in funding? Well, that’s the problem: nobody really knows for sure. Yes, there’s a figure for the reduction but the snag is that the reduction in funding is being met by an increase in course fees and nobody knows what impact that will have on the uptake of courses by students.

Plucking some figures out of the air might give some idea of the impact though. At the moment the OU charges around £10 per point degree courses thus overall a 360 point honours degree costs about £3,600 or around £600 a year on average spread over the typical six years of their courses. Depending on the subject that you do residential schools may increase that to more like £4,600 so say £800/year on average.

However, were the university to double those fees which some would say seems likely, what would happen? Would people find it so easy to justify £1,600 a year over six years? The snag is that it’s not quite so simple as that because there are a lot of quite major universities around the world offering distance learning in similar ranges of courses. Whilst an overall cost for a degree of under £5,000 is quite a bargain generally, that’s not the case were the overall cost to be twice that.

Already discussions are ongoing in the university as to what to do. For example, the science faculty seems likely to drop all but one of its named degrees and is looking for ways to drastically cut the cost of running the residential schools. Whereas right now you can do degrees in physics, chemistry, biology, geology, life sciences and natural sciences in the future there might only be the option to do just “science” albeit with at least some of the currently existing degree programmes continuing to exist as strands within that. Although as they say most of those named degrees were only introduced in 2003 taking them out just six years later seems rather a rapid move on the part of the OU. I’m quite sure that I’m not the only one of their students who ruminated over doing a degree with them for a number of years before actually getting around to it.

Now whilst they argue that they need to drop the residential courses because they don’t make any money on them, they’re in this situation largely because they separated out the residential courses from the courses to which they were originally linked. For example, S103 included a residential whereas S104, its replacement, has SXR103 as a separate residential course. Thanks to the way that most companies sponsoring students on courses work the non-compulsory nature of SXR103 means that fewer people will get funding to go on it.

That’s just the science faculty too. Other faculties attract more hobby students and could see substantial number of courses needing to be dropped if the prices go up too much. For example, how would the various history courses fare at double their current cost? Yes, many of them sound fascinating (and are on my own short list) but realistically I’d have thought that they’re more likely to be done by the retired hobby student population (who tend to get much better marks than the rest of us) and so could be more price sensitive than other more employment oriented courses.

Supposedly none of this affects us students registered for the courses with addresses in Northern Ireland. Not yet, anyway. I imagine that it’s none too ethical but presumably the OU could just supply all students with an NI forwarding address and thus continue to claim the full funding. I wonder if anyone’s floated that suggestion yet?