The Wardman Wire

I’ll be coming back to the New Labour List site, as Derek Draper has kindly agreed to do an email interview with me about the site in the next couple of days and I’m thinking up the relevant questions.

In the meantime, I like that he is displaying a sense of humour, and note that there are still some bits of fluff to pick off the site.

My favourite currently is the title of the website as “Labour’s biggest indepedent grassroots e-network”.

Yep – lots of pedents everywhere, including here. I’m always pleased to be a pedent (or a pedant even).

Did participation in Higher Education increase in the Tory years?

More seriously, on the subject of rapid rebuttal units, Sarah Mulholland (who is currently the National Chair of Labour Students and should know her student statistics) has an article about “Where to go next with top up fees“, which is an interesting perspective but includes the statement:

“After all, since when did we trust the Tories with education? In their 18 years in office they did little to widen participation or increase access, and allowed our universities to crumble though years of under funding. We certainly can’t trust the Lib Dems either after they enticed student voters with the promise of abolishing tuition fees only to drop this pledge when it no longer suited them, instead suggesting that students should simply go to the university closest to home!”

This is simply stated as an assertion, and the published figures don’t support it.

On that “did little to widen participation”, the figures for how many students were in higher education published by the Higher Education Statistics Agency and quoted by the Making History website, published by the Institute of Historical Research are these:

As the History Studies Association comments (and I’d call them a reputable academic source):

Thus between 1967 and 1977 total numbers of students studying history rose 38.8%, whilst total student numbers rose 35.7%.

We can make a comparison with the figures 20 years later (bearing in mind that we have no idea whether they are strictly comparable). Assuming they are, then we can see that between 1977 and 1997 total numbers of students studying history rose 186%, whilst total student numbers rose 492%. This is a significant fall in the proportion of history students, unlikely to be explained by changes in category definitions, but more likely attributable to the rise of ‘new’ and vocational subjects (more likely to be available at the polytechnics which had previously not been classed as universities).

Wrapping Up

Unless there has been some remarkable recategorisation that no one knows about, and it would have to be some recategorisation to generate a 6-fold difference in the numbers, or if the numbers increased by more than 1.5 million between 1977 and 1979 and then fell back, there was in fact a truly massive increase in participation during the term of the last Tory Government.

Or perhaps we did have a 492% increase without the government of the day “doing anything to widen participation”.

What a marvellous argument that would be in support of small government and letting the country just get on with it !

Or have I missed something, and will someone rebut this article?