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Pembroke, Balliol and St John’s condemn High Education reforms

Balliol criticise TEF while Pembroke and St John's vote in support of protest against proposed bill

Pembroke, Balliol and St John’s students voted to condemn current government reform to Higher Education policy at their General Meetings last Sunday. All motions criticise the Teaching Excellence Framework (TEF), currently in its second year. Pembroke also crticised the Higher Education and Research Bill, currently progressing through the House of Lords.

According to a recent press release, the TEF involves the assessment of the quality of university teaching through “core metrics such as student satisfaction, non-continuation rates and employment data. It will also look at additional evidence submitted by providers”. Based on this assessment it will rank universities and award them with a rating of Gold, Silver or Bronze. From its third year, TEF rankings will affect student fees, with fees rising for universities ranked highly by the framework.

The government argues that the TEF assessments will aid student choice. According to Les Ebdon, director of the Office for Fair Access commented, “For disadvantaged students fair access is not just about getting in to higher education, it is about getting on too. TEF will ensure that higher education providers have to carefully consider about how to provide excellent teaching for all their students, whatever their background.”

Yet the Balliol motion denounced the University’s decision to participate in the framework “on the basis that it is a poor measure of teaching quality, and that differentiated tuition fees are detrimental to access”. It also condemned “the decision to raise tuition fees for on-course students”.

Pembroke students elected to donate £100 towards coaches for an upcoming demonstration on November 19, organised by the NUS and the University and College Union. Students will protest against both the TEF and the pending Higher Education and Research Bill. They will attack the government decision to allow universities “to increase their fees based on dubious assessments of teaching excellence”. The motion also criticises the Higher Education and Research Bill’s proposal of an “Office for Students”, which it argues would not include student representation.

According to the government summary, the Office for Students will supplant existing regulators “replacing the Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE) and the Office for Fair Access”. It will also have “an explicit legal duty to promote choice and consider the student, employer and taxpayer interest in all its regulatory and funding decisions. The OfS will be a non-departmental public body which will operate at arms length from Ministers”.

Iris Kaye-Smith, the Pembroke student who proposed the motion, said, “This bill, if passed, would give the government an unprecedented and undemocratic degree of control over academic institutions in the UK, and effectively close off higher education for thousands of students from backgrounds that are already underrepresented at universities, especially at Oxford.

“These proposals are not reforms, but dogmatic attempts to marketise education by forcing universities to put profits before students and competition before intellectual freedom. I think it’s our duty as current students to fight for the right of future generations to enjoy the same opportunities as we have.”

While it was not a unanimous decision, Kaye-Smith states that there was “broad” support for the motion. She also states that at the start of term, three-quarters of Pembroke students opposed fee rises, which is a key element of the government’s TEF framework.

The St John’s motion stated, “The proposed metrics for the TEF do not measure teaching experience and are therefore not fit for purpose”. It resolved to oppose the University’s adoption of the TEF and further increases to tuition fees.

On the information page about the planned demonstration against Higher Education reform, on UCU Left’s website, they mark “three key asks” . These are “to invest in our FE colleges and sixth forms and stop college mergers”. as well as “to write off student debt and stop private education companies profiting from student fees” and “to scrap the HE Bill, halt the rise in tuition fees and bring back maintenance grants”.

UCU Left added, “Free, good quality education is a right for all, regardless of ability to pay and more than at any time before we have to fight for that.

“FE colleges have been cut to the core, with huge job losses and course closures, and a desperate need for investment that simply isn’t being provided. In HE, tuition fees are rising and the government is forcing universities to run like businesses. Students are facing higher debt than ever before with maintenance grants and NHS bursaries scrapped, student loan terms changed and tuition fees set to reach £12,000 by 2026.”

NUS President Malia Bouattia commented, “The government is running at pace with a deeply risky ideologically-led market experiment in further and higher education, and students and lecturers, who will suffer most as a result, are clear that this can’t be allowed to happen.”

Motions are to be proposed in other JCRs, in conjunction with OUSU.

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