Purnell seeks to double UAL’s enrolment via online shift

A leading arts university is embarking on a plan to double its student numbers, largely via online teaching, to boost its “social purpose” and financial health despite England’s funding freeze, led by the architect of Tony Blair’s 50 per cent higher education participation target.

James Purnell, a former Labour Cabinet minister and BBC director of strategy and digital, became vice-chancellor of University of the Arts London – made up of six colleges, including Central Saint Martins – in March 2021.

Now UAL has published a 2022-2032 strategy, titled The World Needs Creativity, that includes a policy to bring “a high-quality creative education to more students than ever before”, increasing the number of students on courses delivered in London by 5,000, with “online and low-residency courses providing 15,000 places” additionally.

“If you look at tables of who is most applied to and who is most exclusive, we are in those tables,” Mr Purnell told Times Higher Education. “We don’t want to be defined as exclusive; we want to be defined as inclusive. So growing is a way of delivering both that access and also responding to wider [student] demand.”

Meanwhile, the pandemic brought “a real-life experiment on what digital learning is like” and a realisation that “there’s no reason to cap our number of students based on the size of our buildings; we can actually offer online as an alternative”.

Is this expansion about UAL’s financial sustainability?

“I think there are other models on which we would be sustainable,” said Mr Purnell. “The fundamental point of the strategy is we’re trying to design the university around what we’re here for, around our social purpose. And by being able to grow, that we can generate surplus which we can then invest in our climate work, or anti-racism work, or in research, or in supporting our staff.”

Another element of UAL’s strategy is “changing the world through our creative endeavour”, building on existing work such as its Centre for Sustainable Fashion, Decolonising Arts Institute and Refugee Journalism Project.

Recent news of a further two-year freeze of the tuition fee cap at £9,250 – amounting to a freeze of at least seven years in total – will mean UAL having to make efficiency savings, said Mr Purnell. “But the better way of responding to it [the fees freeze] is having sensible growth, which allows you to have a surplus, which means you can reinvest and avoid having to make inappropriate cuts,” he added.

Some may be sceptical about delivering arts courses online. But, during the pandemic, said Mr Purnell, “some of our courses that you would think would be most difficult to do online did brilliantly online. Ceramics – it’s hard to think of anything more tactile than that.”

Mr Purnell argued that UAL could “do quality at scale”, citing Arizona State University as an example of doing that.

He added: “We’re going to discover how you do student experience online…Academic support, libraries, social and educational communities – all of those things we will have to do in a way which is appropriate for those courses. And that’s exciting.”

Back in 1999, Mr Purnell’s work in the Number 10 Policy Unit included a paper for then Labour prime minister Mr Blair, co-authored with London School of Economics economist David Soskice, which recommended an increase in England’s higher education participation rate. The aim was “getting at least up to where the South Koreas, the Americas, the Scandinavians were”, recalled Mr Purnell.

That became Mr Blair’s commitment for 50 per cent of young people to enter higher education – still viewed as a totemic error by Conservative critics of expansion.

“The virtue of the 50 per cent [target] was it overcame what tended to happen, which is you’d have a period of expansion, then the Treasury would get worried about the cost and they would cap it,” said Mr Purnell.

He described the current Tory government’s plan for a Lifelong Loan Entitlement as “a 100 per cent [participation] target in effect, for everybody” across post-18 education.

“The beauty of the policy, if it remains pure, is instead of it being politicians who decide if it’s 50 per cent or 75 per cent [participation], it will be decided by individuals working out where they spend their £37,000 over the course of their lives,” he said.

Expansion combined with tuition fees gave students the “core decision-making power” in the system, bringing greater provision in areas such as fashion that have proved key for the economy, Mr Purnell argued.

He continued: “In the future, we should have a system which is learner led – collectively that will get to the best outcomes.

“That does mean the sector will have to be supported to grow and be flexible. That’s why we think that expansion and using online is going to be a key part of the mix.”

john.morgan@timeshighereducation.com