I thought I had grabbed Geoffrey’s slot which I wouldn’t dare do; the other thing I might say about ‘Beautiful Minds?’ is that I’m sorry I’m not a Russell Crowe look-alike – I don’t quite look like him. But most politicians are failed actors and actress – that’s how I would describe us, so maybe in that context you will be tolerant of what I have to say. I am going to talk to you in a more general context than Geoffrey, saying where we are in Higher Education and putting Student Counselling Services in that. I mean I must say, I don’t know about you but I can’t remember a time when Higher Education has been top of the headlines and on the front pages of so many newspapers and it may be that the issues are a bit controversial and contentious, but at least we are there and I think now at least we are beginning to have a proper debate on some of the very difficult issues that are confronting us in Higher Education as we try and prepare to function over the next decade.
I think what we are getting in this debate is a better understanding of the funding gap that’s facing us in the Higher Education sector and one of the interesting things that a number of commentators have actually said to me over recent times is nobody could understand the context in which we were talking about student funding, because nobody had actually understood the extent to which universities had been starved of resources over the last 15-20 years. There has been a 36% cut in unit funding and that has had its impact on class sizes, which will impact on the work you do; it’s had its impact on teaching facilities; it’s had its impact on the resources within the Higher Education sector. There is a five and a half billion pound capital backlog facing us in Higher Education. Salaries of all staff have fallen way behind salaries of other people in the public sector, let alone the private sector, so as we try and recruit and keep the best people in Higher Education we are facing huge competitive challenges not just elsewhere in the UK labour market but internationally. And, all too often in that context, the very important services that you provide in student counselling come bottom of the list of Vice Chancellors and Pro Vice Chancellors as they have to take tough decisions on spending priorities and I think that’s the context in which you’re probably having to think about your role during today’s conference.
That’s on the one hand – the funding problem. On the other hand the demands and ambitions we have for Higher Education will mean that there is a growth in the demand for the services provided by people like yourselves. Our ambitions come really from what I call the basic principle which underpins much of the Labour Government’s programme. What we are trying to do in HE is get that interlinking of both economic growth and social inclusion, not seeing them as competing objectives as they have been in the past with governments of the right and the left but as inextricably linked objectives, which means we want to grow the skills and qualifications of our workforce so that we can be effective in the knowledge economy, but equally we want to provide real opportunity for every individual in our society to exploit their potential, to realise their full potential, so that we build better inclusion.
How does that translate into practical targets and objectives that we have set ourselves in Higher Education? Firstly, we have got our target to expand numbers to 50%, to grow the number of under-30s who participate in higher education to 50% by the year 2010. That’s not a target, as some are suggesting, that was dreamt out of some form of political correctness; it is a target which is very, very firmly grounded in our analysis of what is happening in the labour market. All the predictions of how the labour market will move over the next decade suggest that 8 out of 10 of the jobs that will be created in the economy will require skills, qualifications and competencies that can only be delivered through a period in Higher Education. We know from all sorts of surveys, perhaps the most recent from the CBI, that the demand for people with Higher Education skills is growing. The recent CBI survey on this showed that they expect over the coming period, to recruit a 50% increase in graduates and a third fewer of those with lower skills. So the whole trend is towards demanding people with higher educational skills. And that’s what we are responding to. And when people say to me “We need plumbers and electricians as well as graduates” well the response is that we need both. Which is why we have really re-configured that target recently arising out of the Chancellor’s most recent statement in the House on public expenditure and we are going to talk much more about 90% of the under twenty-two year olds having the Further and Higher education and skills that prepare them for the labour market. So bringing together the vocational qualifications that we want lots of people to acquire with the more traditional academic qualifications, which are associated with Higher Education. And the courses that we expect to be delivered in Higher Education will be far more, will be different, I think, from the 3-year traditional honours degree. We are talking about more vocational courses, more foundation degrees, HNDs, HNCs as we move into the more work based education which is a new feature in the Higher Education offer - more part time learning, more distance learning. All that will be, I think, a very different sort of offer, which Higher Education will be engaged in. And probably as much delivered through Further Education as through Higher Education. I think you are going to see a blurring of the edges of those institutional divides as people are able to progress at their own pace to acquire higher skills and qualifications.
So that means you are going to have more people coming through your institutions. But at the same time we have this absolute passionate ambition to change the nature of the cohort who go to university. Geoffrey has heard me say this often enough, but I will keep repeating it: that it is an outrageous scandal that in the 40 years of growth in Higher Education numbers we have seen not only no change in the composition of who goes to university, those of middle class backgrounds as opposed to those from lower income, working class backgrounds, the gap between the proportion of those from the top three socio-economic group and the bottom three socio-economic group – that gap which was 23 points in 1960 is now 30 points in the year 2000. So your likelihood of going – the gap between your likelihood of going is greater now if you are middle class, than it is if you are working class and that’s just a terrible indictment of us all. And our entire social inclusion drive is about ensuring that we get our most talented young people enjoying the opportunities that university brings; and the personal benefit that that can bring to them and the economic benefit that it can bring to society. So that our determination to alter the profile of those who go to universities is absolutely central to all the work we are doing, and that is translated into our agenda on improving standards in schools, the excellence challenge programme which I hope many of you are engaged with in your universities and the way that we are asking universities to reach out much better into their communities to attract non traditional students in.
What will that do to you? That means that there will be an increasing demand for the sort of student support and counselling services which you provide. It means that we are really talking about a very different approach to the response of universities to students. I think much of the culture within our universities is a middle class culture and very often when kids come from lower income backgrounds whose parents have not been to university, adjusting to that culture is very, very difficult and that is one of the things I think we need to address in the way that you in universities respond to the students who come to them. Obviously in a time when we are increasingly asking students to contribute towards the cost of their education, the financial pressures on them as they go to university will also be very important.
So that’s the context in which you are having to work. I think your services are vital in helping us to ensure that students do succeed in Higher Education. You see all the problems but let’s not be too depressed about this, we have still got the recent Mori survey which shows that 90% of students consider that it’s a good thing to go to university. 86% are optimistic about their future in university, 96% of students think that their time in university is time well spent. So we come from a pretty positive attitude to going to university, but growing pressures - financial pressures, different backgrounds and all that sort of thing.
The other reason that we are particularly probably concerned with the contribution that you can make is not only that we want these students from non-traditional backgrounds in their growing number to enjoy the full benefits, but - Geoffrey touched on this - we are concerned with the retention rates that we have in the Higher Education sector. At present we perform extremely well in comparison to our international counterparts. We have probably the best retention rate among the OECD comparative countries, but as we take in more students, as we take in more non-traditional students, as the financial pressures on them grow and as the cohort changes, our drive to ensure that we maintain and indeed improve our retention rates will also change.
What context are you working in? I think we have done a lot in the statutory framework to support the work that you do as counsellors. Geoffrey talked about the changes we’ve made in the Disability Discrimination Act and that was one of the bits of legislation that I took through Parliament when I had responsibility for disability issues. All my work on disability issues showed that actually dealing with mental health issues of people, in whatever context, whether it’s in work or whether it’s in study, is one of the most difficult and tough agendas that we have. To ensure that the discrimination that people with mental health issues face in whatever context they are operating, whether again it’s at work or whether it’s in a classroom, or whether it’s with their friends and their peer group - I think this is one of the most difficult areas of discrimination that we have to confront. And it is only by transforming cultures and attitudes and that’s done through talking with people and through example and by inclusion and all those sort of levers, it’s only by doing that that we will ensure that those with mental health issues are given a real equal opportunity to develop their potential in the universities. Your role in supporting us to achieve that is absolutely imperative. We as a government have put something like 56 million pounds in this year to support universities in preparing for the Disability Discrimination Act as it has been extended to education. Not enough, but it’s a start and I hope it, too, will kickstart new activity, new facilities, new ways of working, even physical changes to the buildings to ensure that universities do meet their duties under the Act.
The second thing we have done is we have reviewed the system of targeted support that we give to students and I announced that, I think a week or so ago - I think it was in the THES a couple of weeks back. It has always been a very complicated system; we have now simplified to something like 5 or 6 funding streams from what I think was 14/15 previously. That I hope will help you to ensure that students get the proper financial support that is available to them, particularly for students with disabilities as defined by Disabilities Discrimination legislation, so that that part of their lives at least can be given, they can get some security about the financial part of their lives.
You are also working in a context where my colleagues in Health have done, I think, quite a lot to improve mental health services. We have got a commitment to have 50 early intervention teams established by 2004 and they will provide treatment and active support to young people who develop psychosis. We have also said that by 2004 all young people who experience the first episode of something like schizophrenia will receive early and intensive support and we hope that improvement will help us reach 7500 to 8000 more young people. We have said we are going to employ 1000 new graduate primary care health workers to help GPs and there is a commitment to increase the community health staff cohort by a further 500. There are crisis resolution teams now to deal with cases of acute mental illnesses and there are particular strategies to deal with specific groups. So that, for example, we have got the black and minority ethnic groups and the women-only day-centres being established to support those groups. Jacqui Smith in September at Warwick also launched the Government’s national suicide strategy and that strategy supports the Government’s hope of reducing suicides by a fifth by 2010. So there is quite a lot happening from the Health Service which ought to support the work that you’re doing with universities.
Let me finally say what I think you can do. All the support services, including counselling, should not be seen as an add-on, should not be seen outside the mainstream of the university services, but should be well embedded and well integrated into all aspects of student support and student teaching and I think there is a lot of work still to be done to ensure that you are properly mainstreamed into the life of the university. I think we need increasing sensitivity right across all the staff working in the university to the changing cohort and the changing needs of students. Whether it’s working class kids who feel out of place, whether it’s overseas students with the issues that they bring when studying abroad, whether it’s responding to the needs of mature students, all those are very, very different ones from the traditional elite who used to attend our universities and we need to respond properly to them in all the teaching and support. I think we have got to get better at building on best practice. We have got to get better at sharing across the university sector so that we find out what works.
I recently went to a conference where we launched a report on Student Support Services, which Rick Trainor from Greenwich had chaired. I was quite struck that whilst they had gathered a lot of information together about how support services were functioning across the sector, there was very little rigorous analysis demonstrating what really provided value and what worked. There was a lot of instinctive comment, not enough rigour and I think if we are going to invest more in the sort of services you provide we do need that much more rigorous data from you all as to really what is effective in tackling some of the issues which confront you in your daily work in the universities. And I am particularly attracted to the concept of the one-stop-shops that we have got in places like Nottingham Trent, Teeside and, indeed, Greenwich, because I think that as a concept this supports and encourages access. It stops students being worried about where to go and it is also deals with some of the fears of stigmatisation that can face students in seeking advice and support from many of you within your institutions.
So really to bring my brief words to a conclusion, we are committed, in fact passionate, about extending and widening participation in our universities. We want to ensure that it is merit not money which determines who has access to the benefits that accrue from having had a time in a university. We want to ensure that we can move forward from the Trainor study that we had and work with you, really, to develop better support for the new cohort of students that we will be bringing into Higher Education. We hope that when we announce the results of our Higher Education Strategy in January that there will be some additional resources in the sector that can be used, among other things, to support the services you provide.
And very, very finally, we recognise that ensuring that students do get the most out of their time in Higher Education depends a lot on the partnership that you can create within your institution between the services you provide and the services provided by teachers working with students and in partnership between you, the local community services and you and us working together to find the best way of supporting our students so they really can develop their potential, contribute to our society and enhance their own individual prospects in our community.
Thanks very much indeed.
ã Margaret Hodge/HUCS 2002