UK Labour to follow Australia’s HE ‘Accord’ if elected?

Should the United Kingdom wake-up with a Labour government after the General Election on 4 July 2024, it may decide to take a leaf out of the ‘Accord’ struck by its political cousins ‘down under’ with Australian universities and put an end to ‘culture wars’ between government and higher education.

That was certainly the hope from speakers at a joint webinar hosted by the UK’s Higher Education Policy Institute think tank and the James Martin Institute, an independent, non-partisan policy institute based in Sydney on 5 June.

Once again, it appears the Australians may be a couple of years ahead of the British when it comes to higher education policy-making – after first introducing tuition fees and income-contingent loans before the UK and then removing student number caps before England did.

The joint webinar opened with Professor Mary O’Kane, chair of the Australian Universities Accord Panel, telling an international audience that what was envisaged with the Accord being introduced by Australia’s Labour government was “not seen as fixing a problem with the higher education system”, but more about “dealing with the needs for Australia” for the next two to three decades.

Meeting skills need to 2050

“It’s about meeting the skills needed for Australia up to 2050 and trying to get more students from equity backgrounds into tertiary education and how we make use of the knowledge generated in the higher education system,” said O’Kane.

The panel she chaired took 13-and-a-half months to make 47 recommendations in the final report – 29 of which have been adopted, with four more partly accepted, and the government indicating they will adopt most of the other proposals, the webinar heard.

Among O’Kane’s fellow Accord panel members were two former ministers – one from each side of the political divide in Australia – and the Vice-Chancellor of Western Sydney University, Professor Barney Glover, who is currently the Commissioner of Jobs and Skills Australia.

O’Kane said one of the headlines from the review was that there should be a national tertiary education objective in Australia along the lines already in place for the energy and central banking system.

“The one for higher education proposed that the national tertiary education system should underpin a strong equitable and resilient democracy and drive national economic and social development and environmental sustainability – so that’s the big setting,” said O’Kane.

To meet the skills need for Australia would mean doubling the size of the higher education system, and that’s a challenge that can only be achieved by sharply increasing participation by what O’Kane called “equity groups”, which include students from rural and remote communities, lower socio-economic groups, the disabled and those from First Nations and smaller equity groups such as refugees and care leavers.

On the side of massification

The final report from O’Kane came down firmly on the side of ‘massification’ for the Australian system in contrast to the often negative debate in the UK about whether the 50% target for young people going to university was a good or bad thing.

The Australian Accord recommends: “Lifting the tertiary attainment rate of all working age people (with at least one Certificate III qualification or higher) from 60% currently to at least 80% by 2050.”

So, the whole tone is about meeting employers’ skills demand and strengthening the relationship between the higher education system and the vocational education and training system.

The review panel also wants “early exit students” – those leaving after say two years from a three-year course – to be awarded some sort of qualification. The Australian government was also urged to tackle ‘placement poverty’ for those studying for professional qualifications who can’t afford the practical placement required. These costs should be paid by the government paying students below the poverty line, the report said.

Parity by equity groups

The Accord’s aim is population parity by equity groups through reaching out to children when they are very young and gearing the whole education system to build aspirations and fix the student income support system, which in Australia is not under the Department for Education but more under the Social Security department.

Recommended for the chop is the ‘jobs ready graduate programme’ introduced by the previous government, which was an incentive structure to encourage people out of the humanities, “but it spectacularly didn’t work’, said O’Kane.

The one disappointment for O’Kane is the hard-line the Australian Labor government is taking on international students. “We made some recommendations on international education, but they are not the ones that the government has implemented – but they were along those lines, only in a softer form,” she said.

Research is another area where the government response has so far been disappointing and there is to be another review of research funding, which in Australia relies on universities paying half the cost of research and development (compared to UK universities paying 25% for R&D).

Both systems are heavily reliant on surpluses from international tuition fees subsidising research expenditure.

There’s still a lot of work to be done and O’Kane said the government is going to “recreate the Australian Tertiary Education Commission that we had from 1944 to 1988” as a body “at the heart of the system” which can understand, plan and support tertiary education instead of the government just reacting to events.

Fix broken system in England

Responding to O’Kane’s opening address, Professor of Government Practice and Vice-Dean for Social Responsibility at the University of Manchester Andy Westwood said that while O’Kane and her panel may think their work is not about fixing the Australian tertiary education, in England it will be about “fixing broken things”.

He said: “There are lots of aspects of the system that are broken,” citing further education colleges struggling with totally inadequate funding for a decade or more and now universities facing financial collapse with frozen home tuition fees and falling international student numbers.

Westwood, who was a special adviser to John Denham when he was Secretary of State for Innovation, Universities and Skills, in the last Labour government, said if Sir Keir Starmer is fortunate enough to become Labour’s first prime minister in 14 years in the UK, Labour will probably carry out a big spending review in the Autumn 2025.

“So, we’re 13-and-a-half months to do something like the ‘Accord’ – “exactly the time it took in Australia to build consensus to work in a collaborative way.”

Long-term strategy

Westwood predicted that once Labour is elected, it would be “a much more active government and will introduce an industrial strategy,” with a pledge of “good jobs everywhere”.

He said further and higher education needs to think now what their role will be in achieving those goals and warned universities to be ready for a change to a ‘systems approach’ that is focused on the long term.

“While a lot of things need urgent attention, it is going to be very hard for an incoming government to approach those things without a clear idea what you want the system to look like and what you want it to achieve in the long term,” he said.

Professor Duncan Ivison, deputy vice-chancellor (research) at the University of Sydney from 2015 until 2022 and, from 1 August 2024, president and vice-chancellor of the University of Manchester, told the webinar he had a foot in both camps and was looking forward to his role “coming with the Australian Accord in his back pocket”.

Respond to any positive overtures

His message to fellow UK higher education leaders was to be ready to respond to any positive overtures from the next government and move away from a “transactional one-to-one, global-ranking-driven type thing”, and embrace collaboration, both with the government and the rest of the tertiary education sector.

Ivison said Australia had burnt through education ministers at a speed faster than the UK had changed prime ministers and had to put up with “a lot of bad ideas like the job ready graduates’ bill, which upturned higher education funding for no good reason”.

“The fact that we had a new (Labour) government to take a systematic review of the higher education system and do it in a partnership way was a pretty powerful change in tone,” he noted. “The Australian Accord is a great model and shows there are other ways of doing things,” he added.

However, Ivison cautioned that one should not think that this will be the end of the market in higher education.

From the Australian experience it may be “a weird combination of Thatcherism and Stalinism” – with a more liberal approach – should the UK follow Australia and do something similar to the Accord in reviewing how to plan for “better integration between higher and further education and between research and teaching and equity goals”, he explained.

Libby Hackett, chief executive at the James Martin Institute for Public Policy, said what had been so positive about the recent Australian experience is “the fact it is called an ‘Accord’” and that the review was “collaborative and constructive in both tone and engagement” and not just another government review.

Asked what piece of evidence produced the change in approach from Australia’s new Labour government, particularly its acceptance that massification of further and higher education was the way forward, Hackett replied: “It’s never evidence (that forces the change), but once they have changed their philosophical position, they will then pick up the evidence and use it and weave it into their narrative. The evidence has been there for a long time.

“It’s a hearts debate, not a head debate, and we have got to find ways in the UK of shifting the public narrative and the political narrative towards this more optimistic view that this is for everybody. Everyone needs some sort of post-school qualification if we want the economy to grow.”

Nic Mitchell is a UK-based freelance journalist and PR consultant specialising in European and international higher education. He blogs at www.delacourcommunications.com