UK ‘going backwards’ on university access, warns Justine Greening

The UK has “gone backwards” when it comes to its record on helping students from disadvantaged backgrounds, a former Conservative education secretary has claimed.

Speaking at Times Higher Education’s World Academic Summit at the University of Manchester, Justine Greening said she was disappointed by the record of the former Tory administration.

“We have gone backwards – we have deprioritised widening access,” said Ms Greening, who left Parliament in 2019. “We have failed to find the solutions that are out there and problems have got bigger because of Covid.”

In a conversation with former Ucas chief executive Mary Curnock Cook and THE editor John Gill, the former Tory MP for Putney also questioned whether some of the Conservatives’ flagship policies on higher education – in particular, degree apprenticeships – were likely to help poorer students.

“I would not have known what apprenticeship to do at 17 – I didn’t have that kind of advice, but I did know what degree I wanted to do,” said Ms Greening, who studied business economics and accounting at the University of Southampton.

“We need information if you want to have true choice,” continued the former Cabinet minister on the lack of advice and support for first-in-family students like herself.

The former Cabinet minister, who founded the Social Mobility Pledge campaign to encourage businesses to work with students from less privileged backgrounds, said she also favoured “significant reform” of the apprenticeship levy.

“I would increase it and widen it out to give employers more choice on if they want to support the graduate route or the apprentice route,” said Ms Greening.

Ms Greening’s comments come despite improving metrics on university access, with 29.2 per cent of children on free school meals progressing into higher education in 2021-22 – the highest ever level.

However, Ms Greening said she was concerned over a deterioration of outcomes for students from poorer backgrounds – a point echoed by Ms Curnock Cook, who worried that the abolition of student grants and the failure to uprate maintenance loans in line with inflation had impacted hugely on students.

“You can find some statistics to make it look it hasn’t made a difference, but the degradation of student finance has done so much damage,” said Ms Curnock Cook.

“Young people can barely afford housing in what I call the ‘cost of learning crisis’,” she argued, adding: “They cannot afford rent, they cannot afford to eat and they are working so many hours.”

Given that more than 50 per cent of students are now working – with many on “full-time hours” – students “do not benefit from the whole university experience”, she said, adding that the educational environment becomes “very transactional” in such circumstances.

jack.grove@timeshighereducation.com