ENS statement on top-up fees, student poverty and education funding

Posted on December 15, 2005
Filed Under ENS Statements, Inside NUS

The following statement on education funding was agreed as a basis for campaigning at the ENS winter gathering on 10 December.

Education funding: building a national campaign

1 We want a society based on provision for human need, not one regulated by the demand for private profit which is driving force of capitalism.

1.1 Capitalism has created huge wealth (although at great human cost). If society were genuinely democratic, it would now be easily possible to abolish poverty and provide for basic needs (good food, housing, education, healthcare etc) across the world.

2 We are in favour of free education. The demand for free education asserts human need (in this case the right to access high quality education as a human entitlement, not a commodity to be bought in the marketplace) over the logic and requirements of capital. It pushes the market back; it contains an idea that if generalised would create a new and better society.

2.1 Free education is a concept that must be retained and defended. But the demand for free education needs to be broken down into ideas and campaigns that can have immediate grip.

2.1.1 The question of how to pay for free education has been answered correctly by successive generations of free education activists: essentially, the rich and business should pay through increased taxation. What matters most is not the precise details, but the general principle: tax the rich.

2.1.2 We support all those demands and campaigns which alleviate the burden of student poverty and debt: abolition of fees, a living grant for all in post-16 education, access to better benefits etc. We do not believe that students should have to work to fund their way through education; where they do work, they should receive a living wage. We support and campaign for such demands, not in the spirit of a lobby group appealing to goodwill of government or college authorities, but as activists building a movement against these institutions.

2.2 NUS has a great deal of perfectly adequate policy on student funding. Much of this policy has been fought for and even written by the activist left. The problem is partly that - for political reasons - NUS’s central leadership has no intention of leading a tenacious, aggressive, imaginative campaign for its own policy, a campaign that bases itself on the grassroots NUS membership and creates alliances (at every level) with the trade unions.

2.3 However, the problem is also that NUS itself - and centrally the basic building blocks of NUS, the individual student unions - is in such a state of disrepair that such a campaign will be hard to initiate, even given the political will. NUS’s defeats on funding issues in the past, plus the defeats of the labour movement and decline of the left, have gutted many student unions. Structures remain, participation and levels of political culture are down.

2.4 We must demand that NUS stands up and fights for its own policies. We must also recognise that NUS itself needs renovating and rebuilding as an activist, campaigning organisation. Development of ENS’s free education policy must be bound up with a discussion about how to fight for it.

3 We also need to fight for accountable, democratic public funding and control of education, in terms of the management of institutions and the determination of curricula and research, at every level and in every sector. ENS must develop policy which links opposition to the corporatization of universities with opposition to the incorporated, business-run status of FE colleges and New Labour’s plans for independent, privately-run state schools. We support control of education by representatives of education workers, students and the community.

3.1 We are against business control or involvement in any aspect of education. While businesses continue to exist, we cannot in general argue effectively against institutions accepting donations from them, but our bottom line is that there should be no strings of any sort attached - a condition which will probably be breached in most cases. We campaign for an adequate level of public funding.

3.2 We oppose market forces deciding the fate of courses, departments and institutions as is currently the case.

4 The immediate new element in education funding is the prospect of top-up fees. Most HE institutions will be charging the maximum, £3,000, from Autumn 2006. At campus level we must demand and organise campaigns and action for reduction in the level of these fees, college by college. At the national level we must oppose any increase in the £3,000 ‘cap’ on top-up fees.

4.1 The question remains: how to generate a mass fight back on the question of student debt, poverty and financial support that is capable of linking together and propelling into action large numbers of HE and FE students. One way would be to focus on debt. We should demand a radical change in grants policy: £110 per week for all in post-16 education. This should be paid throughout the entire calendar year (if not, we must at the very least have the right to claim unemployment benefit during the vacations). This would mean a universal grant of something like £5500-6000 a year, in place of the heavily means-tested grant of £2700 which the government is introducing.

4.2 We should also demand student access to benefits including housing benefit. These calls should be linked to support for all benefits being set at a decent, ie significantly higher level and index-linked to earnings.

4.3 Such a policy, if adopted and fought for, could unite the student movement. It should be tied to other radical policies such as a dramatic increase in the minimum wage, to a figure like £7.50 an hour (the European Union's “decency threshold ”), index-linked so its value does not depreciate. Such a demand would create allies in the trade union movement and be of immediate, practical relevance for hundreds of thousands of students.

4.4 ENS must also look for ways of developing a fight that can include sections of NUS membership not normally central to campaigns. For example we should demand that there be no discrimination against overseas students: we want a levelling down of international fees so that overseas students pay the same as every other student. We should also run specific campaigns to oppose the introduction of fees where they do not currently exist (for example for teaching students).

5 We need to find a lever for translating our demands and grassroots campaigning into action inside the existing political system. One approach should be to investigate the possibility of establishing a Free Education Parliamentary group on the model of the group established by the rail union RMT. We can do this by asking MPs to sign up to and promote a basic set of demands. We should make this proposal to NUS, and if they will not do it, do it ourselves.

5.1 If this group is to be politically effective, it will need to be based on the political left, broadly defined, and exclude representatives of parties and groups without links to the labour and social justice movements, such as the Tories and the Liberal Democrats. In the House of Commons, this basically means left-wing Labour MPs. We might also, for instance, approach radical left members of the Scottish Parliament.

5.2 We should also attempt to create a group of organised allies in the trade union movement.

6 We should develop a more detailed manifesto for education which incorporates this approach and these demands.

7 ENS will focus on these key demands: