Students at the heart of the system? Savvy market operators armed with the information they need to make informed judgements about which course at which institution offers the perfect balance of cost and benefit? For those working in the HE ‘Information, Advice and Guidance’ (IAG) business – be it charities like Brightside, or university outreach services – we know that the reality is almost laughably far from this. There’s more information available than you can shake a stick at; a core plank of the Government’s scheme to empower the student consumer is to ‘publish more raw information from universities than ever before’. Yet, what’s utterly unclear is what students are going to do with that information in the absence of any coherent delivery system for advice and guidance. Because, just at the moment when it really matters that we get this right, the plug has been pulled on all the support systems simultaneously.

I’m not just talking about the demise of Aimhigher here; although, since one obvious consequence of an HE ‘market’ is that institutions will prioritise marketing over altruistic outreach, a national infrastructure with an explicit, cross-sector widening participation remit might seem worth inventing. No, there’s another, parallel market being created that should arguably be causing as much concern.

The Education Bill, when it receives Royal Assent in November, will give schools a new statutory duty: to secure access to impartial and independent careers guidance for every pupil in years 9 to 11. They will assess their students’ needs, and then develop appropriate careers guidance provision which meets these needs in partnership with independent providers. In short, they will be individual procurers in an all new IAG ‘market’ – but one for which there is no ring-fenced budget, and no centrally provided rules of engagement.

This new duty won’t be enforced until September 2012 but, in the current vacuum, many Local Authorities have taken advantage of this transfer of duty by making Connexions staff redundant en masse. So, gone is an infrastructure into which something better could have been fitted, and gone are very many of the trained careers guidance professionals who ought to be the core of any new offering. And don’t be lulled into a false sense of security by talk of the National Careers Service, to be put in place by April 2012; that’s for adults. And while they’re an equally important group of ‘consumers’ for universities, the signs that HE IAG will be prioritised by this service aren’t good either.

So, the schools that already do this well will continue to give their students the enormous advantage that sound advice and guidance makes. For those without access to such advice, the gulf will widen further. Universities provide masses of advice already, yet coverage is not universal and the market imperative risks seeing focused recruitment trump broader outreach work. But this is a risk we must guard against. You’d expect someone like me, running a charity seeking to connect, inform and inspire more people to achieve their potential through education, to argue strongly in favour of maintaining the broadest possible approach. But in my experience most of the staff who have tirelessly delivered outreach over the last decade, much of it altruistic, share my concern and frustration at it being undermined.

Silver bullets there are none, but one smart approach that some of Brightside’s university partners are taking is to provide combined initiatives that speak to a number of priorities. We provide an e-mentoring service that universities (and others) can embed into their outreach activities – making ongoing mentoring support available beyond the summer school or shadowing scheme, and generally being the thread that binds intermittent, face-to-face activities.

Moreover, our HEI partners are increasingly seeing this as a way not just of supporting outreach and providing volunteering opportunities for their undergraduates, but also of aiding retention and success (third years mentoring first years) and promoting employability (recent graduates and local employers mentoring second and third years). Hitting 3 OFFA priorities with one approach surely can’t be bad.

This is just one example amongst many, but whatever form such collaboration takes – and however much universities may understandably rail against yet again having to make up for problems for which they are not responsible – it is crucial that this collaboration happens. Notwithstanding all other pressures, we must respond to the serious and growing need for clear, impartial information and advice about the system. If we don’t, then it’s not clear at the moment who will.

Secondly, and rather less flippantly, the key proposition – to put students at the heart of the system – and the proposed methods of achieving that mean we’re going to be very, very busy indeed in the years to come. The proposition that students as consumers be given masses of additional information to help them access ‘the higher education they want’ (para 3.45) is coupled with ‘significantly increased expectations for the priority that institutions should give to fair access and widening participation’ (para 5.22). For a charity like Brightside, which uses online technology to connect, inform and inspire more young people to achieve their full potential through education, this is Big Society manna from Heaven.

But it’s manna from Heaven for all the wrong reasons. I’m by no means the first to point this out and I won’t be the last, but Higher Education is not a marketplace and students are not perfect consumers. Giving students endless comparable data and info on graduate outcomes, albeit in clearer and more usable formats than those currently available, will not in and of itself support informed decision making.

With the best will in the world students – at least standard age, 18 year old students – don’t always know what’s good for them, let alone what questions to ask and issues to consider as consumers of HE. What counts as ‘value for money’ in HE terms? What should a ‘good student experience’ look and feel like? What weight should they really give to the ‘informal sharing of students’ views’ on website forum such as The Student Room (para 2.17)?

Furthermore, the focus on graduate employment outcomes combined with higher fees will create perverse incentives. The risk is that non-traditional students will flock to already heavily oversubscribed ‘vocational’ courses such as Law, while the cannier and better informed will make a beeline for apparently ‘niche’ subjects at top institutions which won’t hurt their employment prospects (in Law or anything else) one little bit. I haven’t compared graduate outcomes for Classics, say, or Theology vs Law at Russell Group institutions, but I bet you any money there’s not much in it.

The elephant in the room here is Information, Advice and Guidance – or rather, the advice and guidance elements. The HE White Paper is big on the provision on information, but seems entirely to have missed the fact that information in a vacuum won’t help anyone –or at least, won’t help those who need it most. Sure, the ‘new careers service’ gets a mention in paras 5.9-10 and ‘improving the quality of careers guidance’ shows up in 5.11-12 but it’s a straight cut and paste from the Education Bill. The chance to really press home the message about the fundamental role of strong HE IAG in making the ‘student consumer’ idea a reality was entirely missed.

And so here at Brightside Towers we’re rolling up our sleeves, preparing to work even harder to help universities with their widening participation initiatives, and to provide the ementoring that disadvantaged and non-traditional students are going to need, now more than ever, to help them navigate the brave new HE world. And therein lies the problem – if the proposals in this White Paper were really going to ‘improve social mobility through fairer access’ then charities like ours should be looking for some other problem to solve, not bracing ourselves for more work than ever…

‘It is noteworthy that three very different types of institution do consistently well in the NSS: the Open University, Buckingham and Oxford and Cambridge. What they share, in very different ways, is a commitment to close contact with students and focus on academic feedback.’

Taking the OU distance learning example out of the equation for the moment, this is surely vastly at odds with the pull ‘em in and pile ‘em high aims of the White Paper in encouraging the expansion of the top end of the sector. What makes the commitment to close contact and focus on feedback possible is the size of the institutions (mediated through the collegiate system at Oxbridge) and the high academic to student ratio. As student numbers start expanding and in the face of reduced income to universities (whatever the Government claims to the contrary) that sort of service is surely going to be ever harder to maintain where it does occur, and impossible to implement where resources are already too stretched. Maybe the Russell Group will have to start taking a leaf out of the OU’s book after all…

It’s been one hell of a start to the year, and how we’ve managed to get to March intact I’m not sure.  I’ve never known such genuine chaos and turbulence in the HE system.

In January I was just starting work on a strategic review of BrightsideUNIAID’s activities, and the picture was pretty bleak.  The end of Aimhigher will see us lose 13 regional partnerships, and a couple more university ementoring schemes were looking very shaky where the member of staff coordinating the project was facing redundancy.  At a time when the need for our support was arguably greater than ever, there were serious doubts about how it might be funded going forwards.

How much has changed in just three months.  It looks as if the Coalition’s wild miscalculation of the sector’s reaction to the cap on fees, and their subsequent desperate attempt to strengthen the hand of OFFA to prevent all HEIs congregating at around £9,000, will allow organisations like ours to breathe a sigh of relief.

As one Russell Group colleague put it to me recently, this could be an enormous opportunity for those of us working in Widening Participation; a chance to see real, long-term investment.  And for those who don’t have a WP ‘problem’ at admissions, the increased scrutiny on retention will be to the advantage of WP students, while all will benefit from attention paid to employability.

But if we’re at least feeling that the end of the world is not quite nigh, let’s not forget that in an ideal world, none of this should be necessary.  Our education system should equip all students for their future, in whatever direction it lies, and charities and universities should not have to plug that gap.  What’s ‘good’ for us in one sense highlights the serious malaise in the system – and for a taste of just how near the end of their tether many academics are, see the piece by my PhD supervisor, Professor Simon Szreter, in this week’s Times Higher Education on the breach of trust that really could take generations to heal.

However, in abolishing the EMA the Coalition risks doing serious damage to any pretensions they may have had of being ‘on the side’ of social mobility. To the last Government’s credit it was quick to recognise, and respond to, the national scandal that was our post-16 staying on rate. Their response – the EMA, which gives disadvantaged young people £30 a week to attend college – may have been a blunt instrument, but it nevertheless succeeded in getting those young people into FE and keeping them there, as the revered economists of the Institute of Fiscal Studies confirmed only this week.

Trying to persuade us that the tuition fee proposals will support access to university while cutting off the access pipeline to disadvantaged students does not look like joined up thinking. And the absence of any concrete information about the ‘Learner support funds’ which will replace the EMA will just fuel further disillusionment. Let’s hope that the Government takes the opportunity of the Christmas break to get its communications in order, and start the New Year with the serious reassurances that students and the sector need if they are to believe that 2011 isn’t going to see the beginning of a decline in educational opportunities.

Unlike their English counterparts, he told Assembly members, Welsh students ‘will not have to find either £6,000 or £9,000 to study. This is nonsense, and one of the starkest examples yet of the sort of flabby rhetoric that is going to ensure that any fee rise will have the very effect everyone claims to be most concerned to avoid – putting off the poorest students.

No-one will ‘have to find’ any money up front for fees. Not poorer students, not those in the ‘squeezed middle’, not their parents, no-one… They will, of course, have to pay more back after university, although for the most disadvantaged this will at least be on better terms than is currently the case. But whichever way you look at it – and whether you oppose tuition fees in any shape or form or see them as inevitable – it’s absolutely critical that we make sure we’re at least arguing about the right thing, and that’s debt, not up-front affordability.

That’s not to say that debt aversion won’t see some students rule themselves out of HE, and it’s that we must work hard to counter. Spurious scaremongering about ‘having to find £9,000’, especially from politicians who should know better, risks doing more harm than the proposals currently on the table….

However, suspicion should have been aroused when a revised agenda was circulated which saw Willetts replaced by the lead civil servant in this area, the wonderfully entertaining and sometimes startlingly frank Martin Williams. It was a clever move – what better time for Willetts to announce the official, if not unexpected, end of Aimhigher than while the majority of its senior cheerleaders were safely sequestered in the basement of the Royal Commonwealth Society?

It wasn’t long however before the news reached us in our bunker and, needless to say, all other topics of conversation were eclipsed. It made for a fascinating and rather febrile atmosphere, albeit one distinguished by a sense of impotence, which was summed up rather well by one senior Aimhigher figure whom I overheard on his mobile: ‘at least we can say we went down fighting’.

Of course it’s more difficult to tell than articles like this suggest.  The piece does report that the benchmarks were adjusted again this year. That’s the fourth adjustment since they were first published in 1999, which does nothing but blur the subsequent heated debates.  What hasn’t changed is the fact that it’s still the universities who are being asked to explain their shortcomings, and while some of them do protest too much, not all of the onus for widening participation should lie with them.

If primary and secondary education have really improved and are meeting the needs of youngsters from disadvantaged areas then arguably universities can go back to the day job, while organisations like ours should find ourselves less and less busy, with ever fewer students lacking social capital, making ill-informed subject choices or course choices, lacking confidence and needing extra support.  Yet at the recent inaugural meeting of the Third Sector Forum – a group of charities and not-for-profits who work to encourage widening participation to FE and HE and access to the professions – it was clear that we’re all as busy as ever, and needing to expand our activities.

Not wishing to sound too much like a turkey voting for Christmas, it’s sometimes easy to forget that the goal for many charities ought to be their eventual demise.  I noticed the other day that the strapline for Women’s Aid– ‘until women and children are safe’ – makes it very clear that their work should be time-limited.  I like their thinking.  Planned obsolescence won’t work for all charity sectors, but it could serve as a useful reminder that solving the root causes of a problem and not just getting better at mopping up the consequences ought to be our ultimate aim.

We all understand (in a way that MPs appear not to) the need for accountability with regard to government spending, but my main frustration lies with the apparent randomness with which that accountability is demanded or not.  To win up to £500,000 of DCSF money, under the umbrella of the Youth Sector Development Fund, to offer mentoring services to support information advice and guidance one has to jump through hoops the number, variety and in some instances inappropriateness of which have boggled the mind.  Successful organisations will be expected to submit timesheets for all staff involved, and quarterly business accounts demonstrating how every penny spent matches exactly the submitted budget (the formulas for which were so complex they took the combined brains of 3 organisations’ finance directors to sort out).

In stark contrast, to release £750,000 of DCSF money to support out-of-school-hours learning one has to write a letter to a civil servant containing a broad plan for this year’s activity and a budget of elegant simplicity.  Having been successful, one has to submit a report at the end of the year to say all has gone swimmingly.

This relative lack of scrutiny isn’t right either, let’s face it (although I know which regime I’d rather work under!) and somewhere between these extremes lies a happy-ish medium.  But whatever end of the scrutiny spectrum is deemed appropriate, it is a consistency of approach that is needed, rather than the capriciousness that currently seems to hold sway.  So, one more thing for an incoming Government’s to-do list…

The photo opportunity needed for the TV news was gathered at the always excellent St George’s Medical School (whose Taste of Medicine website was launched later in the week).  Unsurprisingly given the social mobility theme of Labour’s election campaign the Prime Minister was there, along with Alan Milburn, and Pat McFadden, the Minister for Business, Innovation and Skills.

So far, so unsurprising. The real surprise came at the evening launch.  This was a low-key affair, hosted by the Royal Institute for Chartered Surveyors.  Their members and DBIS staff seemed to outnumber invited guests 2:1.  Where hard copies of the original report are now changing hands on eBay for ridiculous amounts (well, sort of…)  the beautifully arranged and plentiful displays of the response remained relatively unsullied by human hands on this occasion.
All in all you’d have been forgiven for thinking that the Government wasn’t terribly serious about this – until you scanned the room and played ‘count the politician’.  Alan Milburn of course, Pat McFadden, David Lammy, but, hang on a minute, it seems that Lord Mandelson himself is going to make a speech, and I’m damned if that’s not David Blunkett…

We shouldn’t really be surprised; we’re within shouting distance of the election, a key theme of which will be social mobility.  Nevertheless it did feel a little incongruous, and some of the asides during the speeches suggested the politicians thought so too.

One has to remain hopeful, though, that this will remain above party politics, and that the new Social Mobility Commission will keep everyone to task, whatever colour the government.  A lot hangs on the delivery of the Information, Advice and Guidance strategy, Quality, Choice and Aspiration, that formed the basis of the DCSF’s response to Milburn, and on whether Connexions can become the engine of social mobility that a national IAG service needs to be.  But that really is a topic for another day…