Not Thinking of Numbers!

For the first time in almost a decade, we now have controls on undergraduate numbers for providers in England, and controls on the recruitment of English students who may want to cross the border of one the three other home countries

The Department for Education (DfE) has attempted to stabilise 2020 undergraduate recruitment by doing something which arguably manages to make it significantly less stable, and at the same time undo many years of trying to widen access.

Although the caps are not public, providers have just been told how many undergraduates they can recruit based on last year's numbers, plus whatever was forecast for 2020/21, plus another 5%.

Instead of the expected (and frequently threatened fine) over-recruitment will be punished by a reduced fee level next time round for providers in England, and there’s a reduced Student Loan Company payment for the devolved nation miscreants.

And if that's not enough to disadvantage increasing popular FECs (and the majority of HEIs), there's a competition for 5,000 additional student numbers in subjects without an obviously common economic or societal skills need, which has designed to be available (at least in part)only to “elite” institutions. Numbers in these subjects (architecture, science, maths, engineering, and veterinary science) will only be available to providers whose non-benchmarked continuation rate is over 90 per cent, and which have a highly skilled employment/further study rate of over 75 per cent, and I can't think of a single FEC with a student demographic profiles those measures will apply to.

But the most damaging aspect, at least as far as FECs and any basic concepts of sense is concerned, is that the Full Time Student Number includes Apprentices, and most of them only attend college for one day a week, some maybe just for an afternoon or evening, So since their employers consider them to be PT they pay only PT fees - and why wouldn't they? - and the students don't come with OfS funding, colleges are now punished for recruiting the students the government has spent the last few encouraging them to educate!!!

All of which leaves me struggling to think of a positive. It certainly isn't to the benefit of students now more likely to want to study locally instead of leaving home for an expensive university experience. And it's going to negatively impact FECs by hundreds of thousand of pounds.

Who comes up with ideas like this and why?

Terminal or Terminology Error?

I was triangulating some background research as part of a series of "What-If" planning scenarios for College Based Higher Education from September onwards (student numbers, financial impact on partner HEIs, etc) and when looking at the government's own High Consequence Infectious Disease page was surprised to discover that Covid-19 isn't one of them.

Had I been reading the website two days ago, I might have thought it to be some sort of April Fools joke, but we're apparently in full stay-at-home lockdown for something that the 4 Nations Public Health HCID Group and the Advisory Committee on Dangerous Pathogens (ACDP) do not consider Covid-19 to meet the following criteria:
•acute infectious disease
•typically has a high case-fatality rate
•may not have effective prophylaxis or treatment •often difficult to recognise and detect rapidly
•ability to spread in the community and within healthcare settings
•requires an enhanced individual, population and system response to ensure it is managed effectively, efficiently and safely

So what's really going on, and why?

 

Twerky with Trimmings

I'm now back from yesterday's learner technology conference on big data where we learnt, amongst other things such as how the concept of learner analytics and big data can be used in educational contexts, what the country thinks is this year's best Christmas cracker joke.
Apparently its: "What does Miley Cyrus have for Christmas?" Answer "Twerky!"

Not withstanding that most of us are getting very bored with the whole twerking thing, especially those of us who live in Yorkshire (e.g. multiple hearings of the very unfunny "where does a Yorkshire man go every day?" "T'werk"), we should at the very least be pleased that cracker humour is at last reaching the 21st century, even if we have a government that with regards to Higher Education is still in the 1950s.

It's now been a week since our Chancellor announced the removal of the cap on student numbers by saying that “this year we have the highest proportion of young people from disadvantaged backgrounds applying to university ever” and that the cap will be removed “at publicly-funded higher education institutions in England by 2015-16”, with "alternative providers also being freed in a similar manner that year". Note that there's no mention of colleges. And still nothing to explain where they fit in. They're not HEIs, so are they "alternative"? The impact on franchised provision we work out (or guess), but what about directly-funded numbers? How can FECs plan for the next three years? What consideration do they need to give to validation agreements?

Fifty plus years of HE delivery in non-HE institutions and it's still some sort of governmental blind spot despite Vince Cable claiming to know all about Higher Nationals because his brother has got one (no, not a joke, I was at the conference where he said it).
Maybe nobody in the treasury consulted him.

Or maybe the Secretary of State for Business, Innovation and Skills was too busy considering the devastating effect that a nation singing Jingle Bells might have on the two-horse open sleigh industry...