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© Cartoonstock The Green Paper Fulfilling our Potential: Teaching Excellence, Social Mobility and Student Choice is a consultation document by the Department of Business, Innovation and Skills (BIS) that sets out plans for a radical shake-up of English universities. One of its many goals is to encourage ‘alternative providers’, aka private higher education institutions (HEIs), into the system. The rationale behind this move has four elements: Widening access : The need to widen access to higher education is a central plank of the Green Paper. New providers are seen as part of this: they “ can offer programmes that are attractive to hard-to-reach communities and to groups of people that are not currently well-served.” Equipping students for the world of work :   As I have argued elsewhere , the Green Paper is rather disingenuous in creating the impression that businesses are unhappy with the quality of university graduates.   Nevertheless, there is a shortage of STEM graduate...

Last week I wrote a blogpost for the Council for Defence of British Universities , in which I discussed the government’s Green Paper “Fulfilling Our Potential ”. The Green Paper is a consultation document that introduces, among other things, the Teaching Excellence Framework (TEF). This is an evaluation process for teaching that is intended to parallel the Research Excellence Framework (REF). I argued against it. I’m concerned that the imposition of another complex bureaucratic exercise will do damage to our Higher Education system, and I think that the case for introducing it has not been made. Among other things, I noted that there was little evidence for the claim that there was widespread dissatisfaction among students.  Put simply, my argument was, if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. A day after my blogpost appeared, there was a select committee meeting of the department of Business, Innovation and Skills to take oral evidence on topics relating to the Green Paper. The oral evide...