More education and access rah rah on the News at the moment. All difficult and complex, but now increasingly feeling like a retread of every debate of the last 15 years and probably more. I wonder if we're missing a trick that we have tried everywhere else. Specifically, I wonder whether we (the state) should reward universities on results, or rather only allow fee uplifts based on results.
This seems to meet everyone's objectives:
1. Academics want the best students they can get, so presumably they'd be for it.
2. State educated pupils do better, on a grade for grade basis, compared to private, so it would encourage universities to take more.
3. And it engages with the levers that universities control, i.e. what students do at the university, not how well the primary and secondary sectors have done.
Lots of definitional questions here: for a start, you'd have to ensure consistency of degree (which we don't have), though you might have a sliding scale to even out the obvious prestige problem (i.e. a First is worth more in a university that has stupider children). And there are doubtless lots of other issues here. I can see the incentives going a bit wrong in terms of the dynamic between independent and directed undergraduate work. However, in essence this feels to me as if it deserves more consideration, especially compared to the complexity of what OFFA is going to have to do now.
I'm just not sure academics (and civil servants) have given it much.
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