Title:
A rejoinder to Michelle Donelan: true social mobility and higher education
Author/Presenter:
Michelle Donelan
Published:
Higher Education Policy Institute (HEPI), 18 July 2020
https://www.hepi.ac.uk/2020/07/18/weekend-reading-a-rejoinder-to-michelle-donelan-true-social-mobility-and-higher-education/
From the article:
Delegates at the National Education Opportunities Network (NEON) event on the 1st July were not only surprised but shocked at the speech delivered by the latest Minister for Higher Education, Michelle Donelan. Its content soon reverberated around the sector and was met with amazement and in some quarters alarm. It was closely followed by Gavin Williamson’s speech at the Social Market Foundation a week later which signalled a further rejection of the orthodoxy of the last twenty years in ending the apparent ‘50% target’ for entry into universities. However forthright the speech at NEON appeared, it should not be seen as unexpected. Doubts about widening access to higher education as a route to improving the lives of those from low income and other disadvantaged backgrounds have never gone away. These doubts have spanned the socio-economic divide from communities where higher education participation is the lowest to the thoughts of the most privileged. To see them finally come into full-view and begin to shape higher education policy again is no surprise – especially in the context of the Conservative Government’s attempt to ‘level up’ and entrench its position in the crumbled red walls of the left-behind northern towns.