Whilst we were looking the other way

At Sir Harry Kroto's excellent lament of the way the UK has treated science, some other stuff happened.

Chris Patten, now chancellor at Oxford, looks at how successive governments have underfunded HE.

But more interestingly, The Higher Education Policy Institute have taken a look at some of the implications of the Leitch Review.

The authors, the always-interesting Tom Sastry and Bahram Bekhradnia, analyse some of the suggestions in the Leitch Review. They suggest, amongst other things, that the initiatives may lead, ultimately, to fewer people continuing with education as the population of young people declines after 2010, and that in order to meet targets in the Review, we will have to see a dramatic increase in the number of mature students studying at university.

They argue that the level of employer intervention that the Review suggests to help increase funding is both cautious and sustainable - only 5000 places out of 1.39 million - but that it is important that the Government does not overestimate the size of the market for employer-led HE, and that it doesn't then use this an excuse to distort or reduce funding.

There is also some interesting reflection of what an influx of learners entering HE through the route of new vocational level 3 qualifications will mean for universities. Well worth a read.

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