Fix negative views of universities to ease inequities, says v-c

Public disillusionment in universities needs to be addressed to help bolster the “supply chain” of learners entering higher education in the UK, the vice-chancellor of The Open University (OU) has said. 

Speaking in London on 3 February, David Phoenix said Labour’s recently announced target of two-thirds of young people attending university or undertaking an apprenticeship should be “a minimum”. 

“We need to actually address the supply chain and get some of these learners with no qualifications at all up to level one, those at level one to level two and somehow to actually grow the numbers that are getting higher education in colleges and universities,” he said. 

“Without that we won’t be competitive and we’re not doing justice and serving society.”

However, he conceded: “We’ve got to do it at a time when people’s perception of university is not as positive as it was.

“There isn’t the same belief for many in the power of the university education and the funding model we’ve got is broken and is recognised as being broken in terms of how it’s going to serve the future.”

He referenced regional inequities, with young people from deprived parts of the country among the least likely to go to university. 

“How can it be right in one of the biggest economies and what we say is a knowledge-based society, [that] it depends who you are, where you’re born and the family circumstances, whether you’re likely to go to university? That challenge is even greater now, I would argue, than previously.”

Phoenix was speaking at an event in Westminster celebrating the 60-year anniversary of the publication of the former Labour government’s University of the Air White Paper, which paved the way for the OU’s creation. 

Decades on, Phoenix said the OU was trying to re-envisage what being “a university without walls means”. 

“We’ve often argued that being digital [means] anybody can access, but that’s not true. 

“The populations that are hardest to reach don’t understand what the opportunity is, so if we’re really going to have a university without walls, we need to actually work in partnership and embed opportunity through those partnerships in the different communities around [the] UK and globally.”

He said this includes “working with colleges, working with businesses, working with local government [to] make sure that there is a physical presence and an opportunity for people to see the ability to actually go on and study”.

Earlier this year, the university scrapped plans to open a physical campus in Milton Keynes. At the time, Phoenix told Times Higher Education that there was already a “degree of oversupply” in traditional face-to-face university courses.

In a pre-recorded video played at the event, skills minister Jacqui Smith said the government’s new participation target was part of its drive to “break the damaging link between background and success”.

She also mentioned the lifelong learning entitlement (LLE) – a revamp of the student finance system to allow more modular study throughout an adult’s life – saying this would support individuals to “retrain throughout their working lives”. 

Smith said the OU’s experience in offering flexible provision would help to “inform and inspire the mobilisation of providers in their own tentative first steps towards modular study”. 

helen.packer@timeshighereducation.com