When the number of full-time 18-year-olds going to university dips by a few percentage points it makes big headlines. But while the public’s attention has been focused elsewhere, the part-time higher education market has been quietly decimated.



Numbers of part-time students, who are typically older and often juggling a job or family, or both, have more than halved. They are down 56% since 2010, according to the latest figures from the Higher Education Statistics Agency.



Admissions have been declining for a decade, but fell from 243,355 in 2010-11 to just 107,325 in 2015-16.

Experts point the finger at inadequate financial support from the government. Part-time enrolments in England slumped in 2012 when the government raised the cap on fees, doubling or even tripling the cost of many courses. To counter this, tuition fee loans were offered to part-timers for the first time. But research shows about two-thirds of students weren’t eligible.

Can we save part-time higher education? In the latest of our 2VCs discussion series, Anna Fazackerley talks to Peter Horrocks, vice-chancellor of the Open University, and Prof Janet Beer, vice-chancellor of the University of Liverpool and the new president of Universities UK, the vice-chancellors’ umbrella group.

The OU is synonymous with part-time learning – 40% of the UK’s part-time students choose its flexible distance-learning courses. They are typically older learners, with three-quarters working as well as studying. It is Britain’s biggest university and its students consistently put it near the top of the National Student Satisfaction Survey. But it has been hit hard: student numbers have fallen by 30% between 2010-11 and 2015-16.

The University of Liverpool is a research-intensive institution in the elite Russell Group. This group is not generally known for its part-time or adult learning, and only 2% of Liverpool’s undergraduates study part-time. But the university bucks the trend as the largest provider of wholly online postgraduate programmes in Europe, all part-time. Liverpool has 10,000 online students from 160 countries, studying in virtual classrooms that minimise the disruption to their families and working lives.

What does the future look like for the OU?

The OU is a cherished British institution, but is facing a battle to reinvent itself. I ask Horrocks whether he is angry that his university has been so damaged by an apparent lack of care from politicians.

“I’m upset,” he says. “I’m upset for the students. I often come across students who joined us before the 2012 changes and who tell me they wouldn’t have been able to study under today’s conditions. I think: ‘Who is that student who isn’t even approaching us? Who is sitting in a dead-end job and hasn’t got that chance to improve? Or whose job is threatened by new technology?’’’

Horrocks says he wants new “learning and earning” incentives to make sure these lost students have the support they need to turn their lives around. “This government has said it wants to be able to help those who are just about managing, those at different kinds of disadvantage, so we need to see those policies coming through,” he says.

“We need to think about the needs of a workforce that might be hungry for a different kind of lifelong learning,” adds Beer. “As people stay at work for longer and change jobs more often, we need to loosen up who comes in and out of universities.”



This means focusing more on continuing professional development, including some learning that won’t end in a certificate.

Beer is a big advocate of the OU. “The OU is and has always been considered a jewel in the UK’s higher education crown,” she says. But she is a critical friend: “It is a vital part of the higher education landscape, but one that does need to adapt and change.”

Horrocks is no stranger to grasping this sort of nettle. During his time as head of global news operations at the BBC, he oversaw massive cuts to the World Service after its budget was slashed by the government. Now, he explains, he is undertaking the biggest restructuring programme the OU has ever gone through – “perhaps the biggest any university has had to address”.

“We are talking about many, many hundreds of job losses in the university and we need to make up to £100m of savings, a large part of which will be reinvested in the future,” he says.

The university is also changing what it teaches. Horrocks says the OU will cut back on unpopular parts of the curriculum and is developing new courses that respond better to what employers want and students need over the next 15-20 years.

“We want to deliver our learning more flexibly to fit the life circumstances of students,” he adds. “We want to have learning communities that work digitally so that people can learn from each other, from employers and from our alumni. We are introducing technologies for our academics to be able to do that.”

The writing has been on the wall for part-time students for some time now. Should the OU have changed sooner?

“The university is proud of its long tradition,” Horrocks says. “It has got to change, but we need policy support. The fact that student numbers are so much stronger in Scotland and Wales is a good illustration of the fact that the policy environment does make a difference.”



Is the government ready to act to help older learners?

“Am I optimistic? Not yet,” Horrocks says. But he adds that he was recently in a meeting with a senior Whitehall policymaker who was asking lots of questions about the government’s thinking on higher education funding.



I ask him whether he is hinting that lifelong learning will be part of the elusive higher education review promised by the prime minister, Theresa May, in her party conference speech. “There are good indications that that’s the case,” he says.

He is under no illusion that the fees review has been triggered by young people, who turned out in record numbers to vote for Labour in the general election. But he says that even before the election, the government had been thinking hard about how to upskill and reskill the workforce, particularly in industries susceptible to automation and especially after Brexit.

Beer reprimands me for raising my eyebrows at the news that the government could include part-time learning in the review. “It would be derelict not to,” she says. “The system is broadly working for full-time students of conventional age. But it is not working for part-time students.”

How do older, part-time learners feel about fees?

Beer says UUK is going to do some research into this. “The problem is we think we know why there’s been a decline. One of the most simple reasons is the change in the funding regime. But we don’t know which employers and sectors have been most affected by the fall in part-time and mature students.”

She believes that a public sector dealing with “swingeing cuts” has almost certainly slashed the numbers of employees it sends to university. But there isn’t any proof. UUK wants to find out what has happened to the people who were turned off studying part-time. Are they out of work? Or stuck in the same job at the same level?

Horrocks is aggravated by talk of another review. He is at the coalface and feels the time for action is now. “The scale of the problem is evidenced by the numbers,” he says. Although he concedes: “Further analysis could be helpful in terms of targeting help, especially in relation to employment sectors.”

What policies should the government bring in for part-timers?

At the moment you can’t get a student loan to study a 60-credit module. Horrocks believes these bite-sized courses are exactly what people need when they are updating their skills or learning new ones, so he wants “startup” study loans to make that possible.

Horrocks talks excitedly about Singapore, where the government is offering a lifelong learning entitlement to everyone. “It is only 250 Singapore dollars [£139], but it has had a galvanising effect of saying to the whole of their society, including 90-year-olds who want to do a poetry course, that your country wants you to learn throughout your life.”



He adds that there is evidence that people’s mental health is improved if they are studying later in life.

But Beer is sceptical. “All that is fine in Singapore, where people are used to being biddable,” she retorts. “People in this country are not Singaporeans. There is a different kind of engagement.”



She reminds Horrocks about Individual Learning Accounts, a skills entitlement introduced by the Labour government in 2000 and closed hurriedly in 2002 after widespread fraud. “Immediately, the scam merchants started sucking that up,” she says.

Horrocks isn’t giving up though. “It’s all about who is providing the learning, and if it’s HE-quality learning with a quality assurance framework, that would be a simple way of sending a message that people can and should want to learn,” he says. “That can be topped up by employers or by the government in relation to industrial sectors that are in decline.”

What about ELQ funding?

In 2007, the Labour government delivered the first blow to part-timers by cutting ELQ (equivalent level qualification) funding for people wanting to study a second degree at the same level as their first. This government has now reversed the rules for certain science and technology subjects. But the OU wants it to scrap the policy. I ask if this is too costly to be realistic.

“It’s not a lot of cash compared to the extra call on the loan book that was done at the stroke of a pen through the PM’s conference speech,” Horrocks says. “Changing the repayment terms for graduates was the right thing to do but far more expensive.”

Both he and Beer agree that explaining to students that there are some courses they can get loans for and some they can’t makes everything complicated.

“I’ve lost count of the number of employers who say to me that they are screaming out for mid-career people to be able to develop,” Beer adds.



The part-time market is less predictable than the full-time one; far more part-timers drop out because their lives are often complicated.



Horrocks believes universities should do more to recruit and keep part-time students. “Of course, universities try to add diversity, but there isn’t that much in age and experience. Having that diversity, even if it’s only one or two people in a classroom, especially in relation to learning that is relevant to employment, can bring a huge amount.”

“Mature students make life worth living when you are teaching,” Beer adds.

Horrocks adds that allowing students to transfer credits – which not all universities do – can matter to older leaners. He says he recently met a student who had dropped out of the University of Oxford and come to the OU partly because she could bring some credits with her.

Beer agrees with Horrocks. She says that when she was head of English at Manchester Metropolitan University, the programme lead also taught at the OU and had a passion for mature learners. They reached an agreement with the local OU office that students could go in and out of full-time study at Manchester Metropolitan and part-time study at the OU as their lives dictated. “It wasn’t huge numbers of students, but that flexibility really mattered,” she says. “We are

so rigid in our demarcation in higher education.”

Janet Beer

Janet Beer. Photograph: University of Liverpool

What was your first degree and where did you study?

BA in English language and literature, University of Reading

What is your secret vice?

Syrup tart

What is your signature dish?

Steamed pudding

Name three things you love about your university city:

The people, the arts and culture, the big sky

What book is on your bedside table?

The Book of Dust by Philip Pullman

What would your perfect autumn weekend involve?

Interesting food, great theatre and a walk – urban or rural – with my family

What did you want to be when you were 18?

A Guardian journalist (not sucking up, I read too much George Orwell as a teenager)

Peter Horrocks

Peter Horrocks. Photograph: Open University

What was your first degree and where did you study?

My first degree is my only degree. I am a poorly qualified VC, but then the OU believes in giving anyone a chance. I studied history at Cambridge

What is your secret vice?

Taramasalata and toast while watching old episodes of the West Wing

What is your signature dish?

Lasagne

Name three things you love about your university city

Running with our spaniel round the many lakes of Milton Keynes; the millions of trees and vast green spaces of the town; and the fact that no one else outside Milton Keynes knows it has lakes and endless greenery

What book is on your bedside table?

Do VCs still read books? On my Kindle is All Out War, the Full Story of Brexit by Tim Shipman

What would your perfect autumn weekend involve?

Visiting Cómpeta in Andalusia, Spain, walking in the hills all day, then dancing all night

What did you want to be when you were 18?

A journalist who reported things that would inspire audiences to make the world a better place. That was challenging in journalism, so I thought I’d try to achieve that through higher education, aged 58

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