D6010-11_Compass_Jan2012_WEB.pdf


Opinion pieces 

For A Really Open University 
 
 
 
Patrick Ainley 

School of Education 
 
 
 

Lord Browne’s Independent Review of Higher Education Funding and Student Finance, codified in the 

Government’s White Paper, Higher education: students at the heart of the system, marks the end of efforts to 

reform society through education. 

 
If carried into legislation, it will close a programme of progressive reform that began with the official 

introduction of comprehensive schools in 1965. These reforms paved the way for the expansion of further 

and higher education, including the polytechnic experiment. Unlike 11+ selection, which became a thing  

of the past in 80% of English secondary schools, reforming education at all levels was designed to  

change society by creating equal opportunities for all. The logic of reform carried forward to the inclusion 

of children with special needs, a common exam at 16 and a National Curriculum sold to school teachers 

as a universal entitlement, as well as – more recently – widening participation in higher education to  

nearly half of 18–30 year olds. 

 
Now, arts and humanities study will be the preserve of overseas students and others rich enough to 

pay for it at elite and surviving campus universities. For the rest, increasingly vocationalised courses 

contracted out to the private sector will mean that only science, technology, engineering and medicine 

programmes will be state-funded as many of the remaining universities and colleges collapse and merge 

into local e-learning hubs offering part-time and distance learning provision. 

 
We are therefore in danger of creating the social hierarchies witnessed in 1944–65, when social mobility 

only for a minority of ‘bright’ working class children was defined in narrowly academic terms. Only there 

has been no real social mobility since the 1970s when the post-war period of full male employment 

ended. It had allowed limited upward social mobility into the expanded non-manual middle class from 

the formerly industrial manual working class. Since then, there has only been apparent social mobility   

as widening participation presented itself as the professionalisation of the proletariat while disguising 

an actual proletarianisation of the professions, including particularly the academic and wider teaching 

profession. Now the false prospectus of professionalisation through education is becoming widely 

apparent as HE faces its own credibility crunch and many students are unlikely to mortgage their futures 

on raised fees for promised graduate premiums that cannot be redeemed. 

 
HE therefore faces a future in common with schools and further education (FE). Education can no longer 

be complicit in sustaining false hopes for future generations. We have to recognise that the old nostrums 

– ‘expand GDP and become better educated, trained and qualified’ – no longer apply and we cannot 

educate our way out of recession. A new education is therefore necessary in relation to a sustainable and 

no-growth economy in which schools, colleges and universities will play a new part in regeneration an



Compass: The Journal of Learning and Teaching at the University of Greenwich, Issue 4, 2012 

 

2 
 

recreation of all sorts. This has been recognised by the more radical of the student resistance, informed not only 

with the tactics but the ideas of the climate camps and the alter-globalisation movement. 

 

The sixth form and FE students who joined the November 2010 demonstrations knew their hopes for the future 

were being taken from them. Indeed, the strongest argument against raising fees, scrapping the Education 

Maintenance Allowance (EMA) and for returning to free post-compulsory education remains – what else are school 

leavers expected to do in “a youth labour market which has imploded”, as Professor Alison Wolf says (three times!) 

in her March Review of Vocational Qualifications? ‘Gringos’ (graduates in 

non-graduate occupations) add a new tier of graduatised retailing to what is para-professional work at best, displacing 

non-graduates into even more part-time, precarious and deskilled jobs. 

 
In a democratic society, education at all levels, as the institutionalised means of critically reproducing culture 

down the generations, aims to learn from the past to apply its lessons in the future. This is   the purpose that 

public education at all levels must recover before it is too late. All courses of (higher) education should therefore 

aim not only at induction of students into disciplinary or cross-disciplinary 

areas of practice and their associated fields of knowledge, but also for students to add to these bodies of 

knowledge and their practical applications by new acts of creation, experimentation, investigation 

or scholarship as the warrant of the quality of their graduation. A public university, free and open to all applicants 

as an entitlement, requires such a new model of research and teaching. 
 
 

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

 
ISSN 2044-0081 

 
D6010-11 E January 2012