Browne report is the legacy of New Labour

One might have assumed that the educational legacy of New Labour – an administration unparalleled in its commitment to broadening access to higher education – would be that a bright, working-class school leaver could be sure that university was an affordable and worthwhile investment in their future.

Thirteen years on, however, with the suggestions of the Browne report looming, the prospect of affordable higher-education looks infinitely further off than it ever did in 1997.

Why, then, has New Labour’s drive to open up higher education, manifested most profoundly in the target to get half of all school leavers into university by 2010, failed to create the equality of opportunity it promised? Why is it that instead, high achieving working-class teenagers considering applying this year will find it harder to justify the costs of university than comparable applicants of a decade ago ever did?

Though it may initially appear mysterious as to why New Labour’s plans failed so spectacularly, the answer is in fact very simple. The fatal flaw in New Labour’s plan was the assumption that the number of teenagers for whom university would be an enriching and worthwhile experience could be assigned to a fixed percentage and, more fundamentally, that such a figure could be as high as half the population.

Though widening participation in higher education may have seemed like a noble aim, it created a status quo that ultimately benefited nobody.

On the one hand, it was not fair to the students from the lower end of the academic spectrum who had been pushed into applying. More often than not, the courses available to them did very little to improve their job prospects. Instead of going into vocational training, apprenticeships or simply finding jobs, they spent three years doing little more than accruing debt.

Equally, it wasn’t fair on high achievers. As such a high proportion of school-leavers were now going to university and the government, unable to subsidise tuition any further, was forced to introduce ‘Top-up Fees’. In addition, the record attendance at universities meant that a degree was no longer capable of distinguishing job applicants as it had previously. For bright working-class students, the cost of university had risen dramatically while the potential benefits had fallen. New Labour had created a system whereby grades were less important than the ability to stomach tuition fees.

Finally, New Labour’s scheme made little long-term economic sense. Though pushing for half of 18- year-olds to go to university may have sounded like a radical investment in our nation’s youth, it did nothing but harm.

It has pushed thousands of young people into what amounts to little more than three years of state-sponsored economic inertia and it has placed a ruinous strain on the university funding mechanisms.

It was this, the unsustainable economics of New Labour’s plan, founded on the delusion that access to university did not have to be prioritised, that sounded the death knell for a meritocratic higher education system. It was the debt accrued by years of New Labour’s unworkable plan that has rendered the suggestions of the Browne report necessary.

The effect of New Labour’s attempt to create a less elitist higher-education system has thus been disastrous. In a bid to open university up to the working-class, New Labour has presented bright but poor students with a greater economic deterrent to higher education then ever before.