The government was guilty of an ¡°abject failure¡± in failing to see there would be problems in letting for-profit colleges access public funding.

Sir David Watson, professor of higher education at the University of Oxford, makes the argument in a paper for the ³ÉÈËVRÊÓƵ Policy Institute, asking Is there still a higher education sector?

The paper also repeats Sir David¡¯s longstanding call for a proper system of credit transfer, allowing students mobility between different universities at different stages of their studies.

He argues that the most important factor stopping the spread of credit transfer ¡°seems to have been institutional protectionism¡±. Sir David says: ¡°Institutional heads need to be less precious about the linking of their status with that of the prior experience of their student body ¨C which, admittedly, is a trend encouraged by the compilers of league tables.¡±

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Meanwhile, Sir David pinpoints the government¡¯s drive to encourage private and for-profit providers as a key threat to the notion of a unified sector.

He says the UK government¡¯s stance on regulating private providers ¡°is in contrast to the view taken by other governments all around the world: that the private sector can be welcomed, and allowed to prosper, but can simultaneously be regulated to meet public purposes¡­[In] the UK we have a fear, verging on paranoia, about regulating the private and for-profit sector to the same standards and levels of the public sector in case they take away their ball.¡±

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He continues that the government had ¡°apparently not learned the lesson¡± of a ¡°catastrophe¡± from around a decade ago when a Labour policy called Individual Learning Accounts was abandoned amid investigations into alleged fraudulent activity.

¡°It was this abject failure of policy memory that that led to the government in November 2013 having to stop the enrolment of public voucher-bearing students on Higher National qualifications at 22 private colleges and chains,¡± he says.

Sir David argues that looking to the exploitation of public funding by some for-profit colleges in the US ¡°would also have alerted an administration more cognisant of the international evidence to what happens when incentives enabling for-profit providers of HE to draw in publicly-funded students trump regulatory responsibility for what the students (and graduates) might get¡±.

His paper is based on a lecture he delivered at a Hepi seminar in March. The paper repeats his arguments, reported by ³ÉÈËVRÊÓƵ at the time, that the Russell Group is harmful to the notion of a unified sector.

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He argues that the group ¡°represents neither the sector as a whole, nor in many cases the best of the sector¡±, but ¡°has somehow convinced the politicians that it does play this role¡±.

john.morgan@tsleducation.com