Flaws that Led to Student Controls Policy being Scrapped

1st September 2014

A leading higher education expert from Sheffield Hallam's new Institute of Education will underline the flaws that led to the cap on student numbers being removed at an international conference in Portugal this week.

Dr Colin McCaig will present the first in-depth look at the government's student number controls policy, which was scrapped last December and will see universities competing in an open market by 2015/2016. The report, to be presented at the European Education Research Association's annual conference in Porto and based on evidence from senior University managers, suggests flaws in the policy, which enabled universities to recruit as many AAB students as they wished. Introduced by the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills as an attempt to further increase choice for students and competition amongst higher education providers, it instead led to many Universities scaling back on courses. Dr McCaig said: "The student number controls were to work in two ways. First, a 'high grades policy' was introduced to remove students with 'A' level and equivalent grades of AAB or above from student number control mechanisms altogether, enabling institutions to recruit as many of these students as they wished. "Secondly, a 'quality and value' policy was introduced to redistribute 20,000 student places to higher education providers offering courses with an annual fee of £7,500 or less. But our research found post-1992 institutions were affected, significantly in some cases, by the reduction of overall allocated numbers. "Across the sector, this led to closure and rationalisation of some courses, and increased scrutiny of recruitment and retention, league table positioning, and NSS scores. "Some institutions pre-empted any possible negative impact on allocated numbers by withdrawing modules that have been shown not to recruit strongly." Another paper, 'The Strange Death of Number Controls in England: choice and competition in a marketised system' is due in December.