Unfortunately, the situation at the Open University is far worse than you reported (Open University plans major cuts to number of staff and courses, 22 March). Despite the university’s warm words about working with academics, the relationship between the vice-chancellor’s executive and the academic body is now characterised by deep mutual contempt. The dismemberment of the university under the Orwellian-sounding Student First Transformation Programme has involved endless ineffective consultations, which the leadership has used while enacting numerous changes outside of the normal processes of academic governance.

Where voices of opposition have been raised, senior faculty staff are pressurised to keep quiet (and not to support the pension strike). With an ever-present threat of redundancies, others are simply fearful of speaking out in public. Disquiet with the direction of change and incompetent management has seen innumerable departures of senior staff under Peter Horrocks’s tenure, including three heads of finance, three heads of IT, two directors of strategy and a growing number of executive deans. The current leadership oversaw the disastrous closure of regional OU centres and the chaotic introduction of the group tuition policy, all against warnings from experienced academics.

OU staff are now in a fight for survival of the university, something that can only be achieved with a radical change of direction, or a change of leadership.

Name and address supplied



• The news about the Open University is very saddening, particularly for the many thousands of its students and ex-students whose lives have been immensely changed for the better. It has also been badly affected by the increased competition from both public and private institutions, as well as the government’s destructive policies on part-time students. But it’s also true that much of the damage has been self-inflicted. Under both its previous vice-chancellor, Martin Bean, and its current one, Peter Horrocks, the OU has moved remorselessly further and further into online provision, despite increasing evidence that online or e-teaching does not work well, especially for the less well-qualified entrants the OU was always meant to attract.

In a Brookings e-newsletter in February 2016, Ben Wildavesky, director of higher education studies at the Rockefeller Institute of Government in New York, wrote an article entitled The Open University at 45: What can we learn from Britain’s distance education pioneer?. Professor Wildavesky identified a number of critical OU innovations, but the one he picked out as the OU’s biggest accomplishment was “combining scale with personalisation”. He noted that “for many students … this personal relationship with an instructor is the key”.

The OU’s progressive voyage into a virtual world will increasingly depersonalise it and inevitably reduce its graduation rate (already a disastrous 13%) even further. As for the idea that spending £2.5m on KPMG can help is simply delusional. Many of us still hope it’s not too late to change direction and save one of the world’s greatest educational innovations.

Ormond Simpson

Senior lecturer in institutional research, Open University 1998-2008

• Sadly the huge decline in Open University student numbers was easily predictable. When I started my OU degree studies in 2000, my peers were a mixed bunch. Many, like me, were parents in our thirties and forties, looking to get qualifications to improve our career prospects in the face of increasing numbers of graduates in the job market. However, a good number were older, some very much older, studying for the joy of learning. With the introduction of tuition fees, at levels not so far from those of conventional universities, all those studying for pleasure and personal satisfaction will have gone. The prospect of never paying off a student loan, taking on an additional financial burden for 30 years, was clearly never a sensible option. The proposed cuts in staff and courses were then inevitable.

The decline can be reversed. Tuition fees must be removed for some groups of OU students and a more progressive system introduced for the remainder. Only then will we halt the decline and eventual fall of this great British institution.

Adam Shallcross

Mayfield, East Sussex

• I would urge the OU’s leaders to think again. When the National Extension College took over the University Correspondence College Cambridge it inherited a small number of students taking London University external degrees. In applying the NEC’s novel, integrated media, correspondence and face–to-face teaching to O- and A-levels and non-academic subjects, we realised that they would be equally effective in helping the many outside the conventional education system to get degrees. The London external degree was too limited in scope and nature to benefit from our methods, so we fought hard for the right to confer our own degrees on those whose work or other restrictive circumstances meant no other route was open to them.

Cutting science and technology courses at the OU would be particularly harmful, not just to our economy, but, more importantly, to the prospects and wellbeing of those needing or wanting them. It has been a matter of pride and pleasure for me that my second son has developed a successful career in industry based on his OU degree in those subjects.

John Griffiths

First executive director, NEC

• As an OU graduate and former associate lecturer, I am sad to see the cuts proposed to courses and staff. However, the writing was on the wall for many years, with core staff protected from regular contact with students by an army of poorly paid and casual teaching staff such as myself. The vast distance between the bureaucratic centre in Milton Keynes and those in the periphery was never successfully bridged. Now, alas, the digital age has finally closed the gap.

Dr Alan Bullion

Tunbridge Wells, Kent

• The Guardian is to be congratulated for publicising the leaked proposals for cuts at the Open University. Sadly the destruction of this much-valued institution has not happened overnight. Recent years has seen closures of regional offices, staff cuts and for those still lucky enough to have a job, hours spent travelling to the dwindling number of OU locations. From a student perspective courses have become more expensive and less flexible, in complete contradiction to the ethos of the OU, namely to provide opportunities for lifelong learning for all, regardless of individual circumstances, difficulties, special requirements relating to health or disability etc. Personal tutorial support is being lost in the drive to turn the OU it into just another MOOC (Massive Online Open Course). In case there is any doubt over the disastrous direction of travel, Vice-Chancellor Peter Horrocks in full PR gobbledygook mode on the Today programme (23 March) declared the OU to be in competition with Facebook and the like.

Karen Barratt

Winchester

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