Defining the front line

"So we will continue to campaign for the key recommendations of this report: government should come clean about its financial chicanery and open the books, secure the much-vaunted loan repayment terms in statute, and restore direct grant funding of universities for mainstream teaching activity. The battle for education is far from over, and these are its new fronts."

These were the words of the NUS president, Liam Burns, in his foreward to the new report on the government's higher education reforms by Andrew McGettigan for the Intergenerational Foundation. They are unambiguous. The report outlines some problems and some remedies. And both the analysis and the prescription for what the government should do are being endorsed by the NUS. Some 18 months after suffering the biggest defeat in its history, the NUS has dusted itself down and worked out what the "new fronts" are in its campaigning.

This is of more than passing interest to both universities and teenagers. The Coalition's new settlement for HE is unstable because the public sees fees of £9,000 as too high, because the one thing Ed Miliband has definitively done is to set Labour against it, because it is impossible to see the post-Nick Clegg Liberal Democrats supporting it, and because - as the report outlines - the finances of the scheme itself are shaky. The next election could easily lead to another volte face in policy, and the NUS is one of the major institutions that can shape the debate that eventually determines that new policy.

So let's pause for a moment and look at where the ideas picked up by Burns have come from - the idea that the Coalition's policy is essentially one of financial chicanery, the objective of securing the terms of graduate loan repayment in statute and the belief - against every austerity lecture - that restoring block grants to universities for teaching is practical. 

Financial chicanery

The financial chicanery that Burns refers to was originally laid out by Andrew in a series of six articles that I commissioned for Research Fortnight last year entitled The Third Revolution. We've had a lot of requests for these articles so I'm going to list their PDFs here:

1 The truth about Middlesex   7 September 2011, on how the government was positioning itself to privatise universities

2.1 'Demand would be enormous'   21 September 2011, on how universities could start to finance themselves with bonds 

2.2 Borrowing greatness   5 October 2011, on how bond finance has inexorably driven up tuition fees in California

3.1 'A dodgy PFI scheme'   16 November 2011, on the basic mechanics of the macro financing of the new loans scheme, and the problems that follow

3.2 Shifting the risk   30 November 2011, on the government's four options for reducing the risk losses on the student loan book 

3.3 Into the shadows   14 December 2011, on the murkiest of those options - monetisation.

In total, the series ran to about 20,000 words. We billed it as "a major series investigating how new forms of capital and constitution are set to reshape higher education in England" and events have shown it living up to its hype. 

The series' first contribution was to the government's decision to abandon its plan for a white paper on higher education. "The truth about Middlesex" not only explained how the government was preparing to enable the privatisation of many universities, especially those constituted as Higher Education Corporations. It also demonstrated with forensic strength how universities like Middlesex would be driven to leap into the private sector. Once this trajectory had been dragged out of the shadows, the government quickly lost its stomach for the fight it could see coming.

The financial chicanery was laid out in the last three articles. These went beyond the intrinsic complexity and uncertainty of the new arrangements, already well known at the time, to explain how the Treasury's need to manage the huge financial risk involved could easily become the central driver of the whole of higher education policy. Burns has now recognised the centrality of this issue.

Securing the terms of graduate loan repayment in statute 

While Andrew was digging away on the macro finances last autumn, I turned my attention to "the deal" being offered to undergraduates. I was horrified by the grotesquely misleading financial advice being offered to would-be students by the government and the naively co-opted moneysavingexpert.com. I eventually found myself in correspondence with the Student Loans Company, Office of Fair Trading and government departments over the terms of the agreement to be signed by students to get their loans. It became clear that there was no intention on the part of the government to contractually commit to the generous deal being apparently promised by ministers. The deal, it transpired, was not a deal.

"Thanks to the heedless rush to steer nervous students into the new system, we may therefore be in the early days of another great British mis-selling scandal to add to the various pensions and insurance debacles. Only this time the victims have had their legal redress taken away in advance," was how I put it in November (and the deteriorating economic outlook has only served to increase my concern that graduates will end up being ripped off). Again, Burns has now made this a central issue for the NUS. 

Restoring block grants to universities for teaching is practical

Of course, the NUS needs no help to argue that grants are better than loans. But still, the question of whether it is practical to restore the block grant in an age of austerity remains critical. Amazingly, even if you are an ultra deficit hawk, the answer is yes, it is doable. Andrew's report draws on the idea of the "CPI Effect" that I outlined last September, badgered the OBR to study, and on the back of their estimates returned to in February.

In other words, all three of the central issues cited by Burns can be traced back to the work we did at Research Fortnight last year.

Conclusion

Well by now you know that part of the point of this article was to blow our trumpet at Research Fortnight. But that is only part of it. Because the very fact that so much of this work was done by what remains a tiny set up is troubling. Where was Universities UK? Where were the mission groups? Where were the higher education academics? Where were the think tanks? There's an association of people who provide financial advice to students. What happened to them?

For the 20 years or so that I've been writing about universities I've been willing to accept that, in their different ways, UUK and the mission groups have the interests of everyone in higher education in mind. No longer. Yes, there are many well-intentioned individuals in those institutions. But over the past two years there has been too much silence, too ready a willingness to trade the interests of students for the interests of the universities. UUK and the mission groups have put themselves in a narrow, sectional position. No student or parent or politician can trust them now to provide anything but a very partial picture.

What we need now is some new institutions. We need a charity to promote the benefits of higher education as a whole, and speak for it. We need something like a think tank. We need to reconnect the sadly isolated HE academics with the policymaking world. Above all, we need to start telling the public the whole truth.

“I melt the glass with my forehead”: a film about £9,000 tuition fees, how we got them, and what to do about it

 

This is the complete unedited video of the documentary film “I melt the glass with my forehead”: a film about £9,000 tuition fees, how we got them, and what to do about it  

Directed and Produced by Joanna Callaghan and Martin McQuillan (Heraclitus Pictures, 2012)

 

Related Links

The making of... co-director Martin McQuillan explains why he made "I melt the glass with my forehead"

Full text of the poem that the title is taken from, A Cloud In Trousers 

The making of “I melt the glass with my forehead”

I have written at length about the current state of Higher Education in the UK and in particular on the trebling of tuition fees in English universities.  However, in Spring of last year, Joanna Callaghan (an AHRC-funded filmmaker and Senior Lecturer in Media, Art and Design at Bedfordshire University) and I felt that another kind of response was also needed to the situation we find ourselves in, one in which academics might also offer a gesture similar to those made by the generation of students who have so intelligently and imaginatively opposed the Coalition’s policy on fees.  In order to do justice to the cause of the student protestors, and the idea of the university we believe in, we felt a creative response was also needed. This is why we made “I melt the glass with my forehead”: a film about £9,000 tuition fees, how we got them, and what to do about it.

[Watch the full movie online here.]

The title of the film is explained early on.  It comes from a talk given by Dan Hancox of The Guardian at an event I organised for Universities Week last year: ‘The Humanities and Money’ at The London Capital Club, 16 June 2011.

Hancox tells of the moment when he came across the phrase, ‘I melt the glass with my forehead’, chalked on the pavement in Trafalgar Square during the demonstration of March 26th.  He went home and googled it to find that it came from Vladimir Mayakovsky’s 1915 work A Cloud in Trousers.  For Hancox the citation of the lyricism of Russian Futurism summed up the psychic transformation that this generation had gone through and the creative energy it has called upon to articulate its cause.  It is difficult to dismiss such erudition as the action of feral youth.  I do not believe that the student mobilisation over fees was a moment of revolutionary antagonism (that is someone else’s dream).  Rather, it has been and continues to be an eloquent plea for justice, for inter-generational justice in particular and for a defence of both the public good of universities and the right of everyone to attend them.

I have written such things before; I could and probably will write a book about it.  However, making a film is a different thing and this is also a different kind of film.  Deliberate choices have been made here.  We did not want to produce the familiar documentary in which a ‘celebrity academic’ visits other eminent professors to gather authoritative opinions.  Nor did we want to use a masterly voice-over to explain and give shape to the fragments we had assembled.  Rather, Joanna Callaghan’s skilful editing allows the story to tell itself and for the representative voices to speak for themselves.  From their responses emerges a kind of creative responsibility.  A film that, we hope, responsibly tells the story of tuition fees and their complex history while doing justice to those who kindly agreed to participate in the making of the film.

What emerged during the making of this film is that while £9,000 tuition fees may have a history it is not at all certain that they have a future.  The decision to increase the cap on fees had long been in the making, not only in the pre-election work of the Browne Review but also in the reforms of 2004, 1998, and 1990.  Successive governments have travelled down the road of simultaneously expanding the numbers of undergraduate students attending university while subtly and incrementally shifting the burden of funding that expanding system onto the shoulders of young graduates.  This has eventually lead us to the position we find ourselves in today with amongst the most expensive university fees in the developed world and a generation who with good cause feel that they are paying for the sins of their elders.  In itself this situation would be politically unsustainable, but it is also fiscally unsustainable, as the political compromise within the Coalition has failed to answer any of the drivers for tuition fee reform.  The new fees and loan system will do nothing to reduce the national budget deficit (in fact it will increase it), it will not put any more money into universities (in fact it will decrease it for many), it has not resulted in a ‘true market’ of student choice (both student numbers and fee levels are capped) and it has failed to distinguish between different universities (Oxford and Middlesex, for example, charge the same).  There will have to be further reform after the election of 2015.

Ed Miliband, should he survive that long as leader, has already proposed to reduce the cap to £6,000 (a win-win policy that plays well with the Shires and reduces the fiscal cost of loans).  However, it is not clear if this ‘pre-election proposal’ will be a manifesto commitment.  Miliband’s favoured graduate tax remains an outside possibility for Labour.  The Liberal Democrats may enter the election with the rather quixotic proposal to abolish all tuition fees, a promise which many will take to be not worth the paper it’s written on.  David Willetts has played his cards and a future Conservative administration would wish to push further their agenda of increasing privatisation and marketisation.  They may even wish to encourage the ‘elite’ to break from public funding and to remove the cap on fees entirely.  However, any future minister for universities will now be wary of the double bind of any need for primary legislation that would bring students back to Westminster Square and the strictures of the treasury who will always want to keep a glass ceiling on the cost of the fees and loans system.  None of these policies are particularly inspiring.

Whether one believes that, given all the other competing demands on the taxpayer, it is simply not possible to fund a mass system of higher education without a graduate contribution, or, one thinks that the case for funding our publically owned universities properly through taxation has simply not been made yet, one thing is certain.  If the UK’s diverse and excellent university sector is to survive and students are to continue to attend it in the numbers that they have in the past, then a creative solution will have to be found to the fiscal and political pressures that £9,000 tuition fees fail so miserably to address.  It will require an act of imagination every bit as inspiring as the students’ scrawled chalk citation of Mayakovsky.  I wonder if our politicians are ready to meet that challenge.

Martin McQuillan is Dean of Arts and Social Sciences at Kingston University London.

 

 

Now there's market pressure for you - just FOUR universities cut tuition fees

OFFA has revealed today that just FOUR universities have cut the cost of their first degrees to squeeze in under the £7,500 tuition fee threshold set by the government.

The four are the University of Chester, the University of Cumbria, the Institute of Education and Teesside University.  Sparsholt College is the one college to have reduced its fees.

These are the only institutions to have cut the price of their main undergradaute degrees for 2012 despite the introduction of the new "core-margin" policy intended to create a competitive market in higher education and drive down fees.

While 24 universities have agreed revised access agreements with the Office for Fair Access, most of them have only cut the cost of foundation courses or revised the subsidies they offer students. Bursaries (which don't reduce average fee levels) are out, fee waivers (which do) are in.

Across all the institutions that revised their access agreements, OFFA reports

• an increase of £37.4m in fee waivers
• a reduction of £13.8m in bursaries and scholarships
• a reduction of £2.1m in outreach and retention measures.

So the first results of the government's core-margin policy seems mixed. The market moves made by the government seem to be having relatively little effect so far. Yes, the amount of money being leant to students by the government is going to go down a bit. This will reduce the losses on the loan scheme for the government and make the whole thing a bit cheaper for the Treasury. But students won't be saving so much because fee waivers are often replacing bursaries. And many financial advicers think bursaries are better for students than waivers.

Ministers say it's only a start. But for now at least, the effect of the core-margin policy seems to be, er, marginal.

The verdict on Miliband's £6,000 tuition fees gambit

A day on, the shape and significance of Ed Miliband's £6,000 gambit on tuition fees has become clearer.

The precise form of the pledge Miliband has made gives him a lot of flexibility. He has said the cap at £6k is something he would do now. But the FT and BBC say aides are refusing to promise that the policy will be in the manifesto. That gives Miliband the flexibility to push the cap higher or lower at election time, or to drop the policy in favour of a graduate tax, or do something else entirely.

On the Andrew Marr show, Miliband hinted at pushing the cap lower. “If we can do more, we will,” he said. If you're sceptical you could worry about the cap going higher, but that to me would look weak and diminish the clear blue water between this and the Coalition policy, so I think it's unlikely.

Does this new policy mean the end of Labour's flirtation with a graduate tax (something I'd welcome)? It's hard to find a straight answer to this.

Over at Channel 4, Gary Gibbons reports that, "Ed M’s team say what they’re actually doing is 'bending' the tuition fees policy into a graduate tax." But that sounds almost exactly the same as what Vince Cable says about the current policy.

The BBC's political correspondent, Norman Smith, wrote that John Denham told him that Labour's long-term aspiration was to introduce a graduate tax. But I suspect he may be missing nuances because he then only quotes Denham as saying something weaker and more Cable-esque: "That is the direction we've said we always wanted to move in. A fairer system of payment for the degrees, for the contribution we ask graduates to make. This is something that can be done today."

To me, it looks like Miliband is following the path Cable trod a year ago, not wanting to stir up U-turn headlines while leaving a graduate tax behind in favour of something whose mechanism would be similar to the new system. However, he has a lot of wiggle room and there may still be unresolved tensions within the Labour high-ups over what way to go. The Conservative Party's press office tweeted, "Ed Miliband said that lowering tuition fees is a policy ‘we’re very committed to it’ but then Denham said it was just an ‘interim position’."

Miliband's gambit has come under attack from both Right (Conservatives) and Left (Lib Dems, NUS).

David Willetts says he has written to Miliband asking for details of how the new policy would be paid for. Hopefully we'll then find out exactly what is in store for graduates earning over £65,000 a year. Meanwhile, the Conservative attack has focused on the change in policy. The lines on the BBC at 6pm tonight were accusing Miliband of "weak leadership" and a "cynical U-turn". That's default knockabout stuff and what I see is a party that is - wisely - holding back while it figures out how to effectively attack Labour's policy.

From Lib Dem bloggers there has been quite an effort to paint the Labour policy as socially regressive, with language like "tax cut for the wealthy" flying about. I can't find anything from Cable or the rest of the leadership. As I suggested yesterday, the bloggers' attack is all revolving around deciles of graduates by earnings - the Coalition's favourite terrain - rather than the wealth of the family the student has grown up in, which is Miliband's angle. You pays your money and you takes your choice. But I think it is going to be very hard to make a cap at £6k with higher interest for top earners look socially regressive; it's such a counter-intuitive argument.

The NUS line is interesting, if ultra cautious. £6k isn't low enough? And anyway we want a graduate tax? Of course the NUS would say that. But there is plenty of scope for Labour and the NUS to hammer out a deal ahead of the election around that £6k figure. For example, a pledge to cap fees at £6k for the entire length of the next Parliament might, after inflation, not look too bad - especially if other aspects of student support can be fixed.

Finally, I want to recap on three points I made yesterday that critics of Miliband's plan have not yet engaged with. First, that Miliband is right when he says students and graduates feel weighed down by debt, and that cutting fees to £6,000 will ease this. Second, that however clever the repayment mechanism, £9,000 is viewed as too high by most voters while £6,000 is within the bounds of acceptability. Critics can ignore these attitudinal points or write the public off as misinformed if they want to. But that will be just a quick way of gifting Miliband victory on this issue with the voters.

Thirdly, if the cost of the proposal is £750m a year as the FT has reported, then that is quite possibly less than the corresponding reduction in public spending that would be triggered by the fall in the CPI measure of inflation triggered by the cut in tuition fees. And if you're not stunned by that possibility, you should be.

What Ed Miliband's promise to cap tuition fees at £6,000 really means

Ed Miliband has today backed a policy of capping tuition fees at £6,000 a year. If you are new here, then you should know that about a month ago I recommended that Labour (or indeed the Lib Dems or Conservatives) adopt a policy of a tuition fees cap at £6,000. Here's my assessment of the new Labour policy.

The Sunday Mirror is the original source and quotes Ed Miliband as saying: “Parents up and down the country are incredibly worried about their sons and daughters. We want to take action to make it easier for people to go to university and not feel burdened down by debt. If we were in government now, we would cut the maximum tuition fee from £9,000 to £6,000 a year.”

This carefully crafted soundbite shows that the new £6k policy is rooted in political reality.

The worry that Miliband mentions is real. We know from polling done both before and since the Browne Review last year that most people think £7,000 is about the upper limit of what is reasonable for tuition fees. Much of the outrage over tuition fees has been fuelled by the simple feeling that they have just been allowed to go too high. Voters may ask questions about Labour's economic competence and its ability to make the financing of the policy add up and whether a higher bank tax is what they want. But they won't ask questions about the £6k policy itself. To most people, it is nothing more than common sense.

Equally, he is right that graduates feel weighed down by debt. That is already true of graduates under the existing system who only have to pay fees of about £3,000 a year. The strength of feeling on this that has been uncovered by some recent polling is, to me, staggering. What Miliband has done here is to cut through all the arguments about repayment thresholds and interest rates and go for the political jugular.

What this adds up to is a political recognition of Mark Rawlinson's observation in Research Fortnight (£) that the teenage years are becoming "colonised by anxiety".

Miliband will have no trouble arguing that his £6k cap is also socially progressive. Universities estimate they need a bit over £7,500 a year to cover the cost of undergraduate teaching. So any cap below this figure provides all students with a subsidy. That is most valuable to the poorest students. The current cap at £9,000, by contrast, is above the free market price of most courses. It ensures a subsidy only for those students on expensive courses like medicine or top universities like Oxford and Cambridge, who could charge £20,000 a year or more in a free market. And who gets that subsidy? Overwhelmingly the wealthy, privately educated families who have colonised these bits of higher education.

I've seen some calculations arguing that the £6k policy would be of most benefit to relatively high-earning graduates and hence concluding that it is socially regressive. That seems to me to miss Miliband's point. This is not primarily about what happens decades down the line. It is about the choices being made now. And if it gets more kids from poor families into university then it will have succeeded.

The two different angles in play here on social mobility essentially depend on two different measures for their justification. The government - and critics of Miliband's policy - are measuring progressivity in terms of the impact on different deciles of graduates by earnings - an issue that is decades away. Miliband is looking at deciles of parents by earnings - the here and now of it. Studies by the Institute of Fiscal Studies give comfort to both positions.

The £6k cap is also even more affordable than Miliband realises. Tuition fees are one of the items in the basket of goods and services for the Consumer Prices Index measure of inflation. So when tuition fees go down, so does CPI - and a huge wadge of index-linked state spending, including public sector pensions and many welfare benefits. The savings on this could be over £1 billion a year.

Miliband has now cunningly buried his previous attachment to the hopeless graduate tax. But to some extent, his new policy is a hostage to fortune. If applications to universities for 2012 hold up, then the government will say people have not been put off by the rise in fees and have learnt to like the new policy. But Miliband's gambit also has a self-fulfiling quality to it. By keeping the debate over tuition fees in the forefront of the political debate, he will be reminding everyone of the £9,000 figure that potential students don't like. This in turn is likely to depress applications.

For universities, Miliband's move in the short term adds to the risk that applications and hence income may decline. It also undermines those who have been saying that universities now have a secure and stable future (John Browne, where are you?). In fact, their financing seems now to be highly vulnerable to the tossing of political storms. Tuition fees are a big political issue and Miliband hopes to make sure they stay that way. Come the general election, I reckon all three main parties could end up advocating policies that are in different ways violent repudiations of the current one.

It is what it is

There seems to be some talk at the Lib Dem conference about rebranding the new student loan scheme as a graduate tax (see Elizabeth Gibney's piece here). However earnest Simon Highes and Vince Cable sound, this is a wheeze that is doomed to failure for the simple reason that the new scheme is not a graduate tax.

With a graduate tax, it works like income tax. The basic principle is that all graduates earning the same amount pay the same. But under the new scheme from 2012:

* You have to pay even if you don't graduate 

* The amount you pay back depends on where you study

* The amount you pay back depends on what you study

* The amount you pay back depends on when you study  

* The amount you pay back depends on how long you study for

* The amount you pay back depends on how much you already paid back in previous years

* Your payments terminate when your loan is paid off, not when you stop working

* You have to pay even if you leave the country

* Foreign nationals who graduate from an English university and return home also have to pay

* You have the option to pay off your loan early and not pay anything in future years

* If the government goes ahead and sells off the student loan book then, unlike a tax, graduates won't even be repaying the government but a private company, with the government simply acting as an all-powerful debt collector.

The truth about the new scheme is that it is neither what we understand as a tax, nor what we usually understand as a loan, and I wish people would stop trying to force it into one container or the other. It just is what it is.

 

Review: BBC Student Loan Calculator vs The Official Student Loan Calculator

Today the BBC launched its website offering to calculate how much graduates will repay on their student loans. But the government also has its own official repayment calculator at Future Students. Which one is the best?

For a newly-qualified teacher, for example, the government's official Future Students calculator estimates your weekly repayments at just 87p.

That is just £45 over the whole year. But before you look forward to spending all your hard-earned cash on expensive summer holidays in the long vacation, take a look at the BBC's calculation. It estimates the same repayments for the same new teacher at £681 for the year! That is 15 times more than the official government estimate! 

What could possibly explain such a gigantic difference? Well, the BBC one takes account of inflation in prices, and earnings; and discounts the value of money in the future like economists always do; and allows for your age and sex. The government one doesn't.

Actually, to be more precise, the government one doesn't, just like I told them months ago, when I pointed out to the Department for Business Innovation and Skills that Future Students "massively underestimates how much graduates will actually have to pay back each month".

In other words, the BBC calculator confirms that The Official Student Loan Calculator provided by the government at Future Students is a big fat lie.

I doubt that many potential students will be duped into believing their repayments will be as ludicrously low as Future Students promises. But I also have a question. After this, how on earth do ministers hope to persuade the new generation of students that anything else they promise them is true?

Social mobility in the higher education white paper - an analysis

"It follows that increasing the numbers participating in HE is key to improving overall levels of social mobility in the UK, in order to ensure that everyone with the ability to succeed in HE is able to benefit from the advantages and increased opportunities that it brings."

BIS Economics Paper 14, 28 June 2011

 

"We have no target for the ‘right’ size of the higher education system but believe it should evolve in response to demand from students and employers, reflecting particularly the wider needs of the economy."

HE White Paper, 28 June 2011

 

Why students should be wary of the Independent Taskforce on Student Finance Information

Independent advice on the new system of tuition fees, loans and repayments is exactly what potential students need. But how independent and credible actually is the Independent Taskforce on Student Finance Information announced last week?

There doesn't appear to be a list of the individuals on the ITSFI. But it has announced itself and said it will be composed of people from "the National Union of Students, the National Association of Student Money Advisors, UCAS and the higher education bodies Universities UK and GuildHE". It is to be led by Martin Lewis, the founder of the popular consumer finance website MoneySavingExpert.com, who says he is not being paid. And its deputy leader is to be Wes Streeting, the former president of the NUS.

That seems to make clear that the majority of the people on the task force will be from the universities, their lobbyists or agencies. That is logical because it is only the universities that have the money to fulfil Lewis's ambitions for the task force. He said last week, "I hope this initiative will spread unbiased, best-of-breed apps, websites, speakers, video, print publications, ambassadors and more."

So the one group this task force is not going to be independent of is the universities. Indeed, for all the prominence given to Lewis and Streeting in the initial announcement, this looks more like a universities committee with a couple of external voices than anything else.

But of course it is the universities that want students to take out loans, so that they can be paid for their courses. It is essential to universities that students do not conclude that the loans on offer are unattractive for any reason. If they do, both the income and academic standards of many universities are at risk.

So this is essentailly like car manufacturers setting up an "independent" task force to advise consumers on car finance. Except that in this case we are talking about loans that are maybe five times as big as you need for a new car. No one would take that kind of industry panel seriously. Why treat this one differently?

Well, universities are not car dealers. There is a difference. But the conflict of interest is real. And I am unnerved by what has already happened.

Clearly the task force has it in mind to produce a website explaining it all to students. But such a website already exists. It was set up by the government several months ago and is called Future Students. As I pointed out on Friday, this is busy spewing out voodoo garbage at students, who are likely to discover upon graduation that their loan repayments are possibly twice as big as Future Students promised them.

Where have Lewis, Streeting and all the student money advisers been? They are supposed to be expert and concerned and, we are asked to believe, independent. Why haven't they been telling 17 year olds to avoid Future Students, and the government to get its facts straight? 

I can believe that Lewis and Streeting (and indeed other panel members) are trying to do the right thing. But the two are unpaid and hence with limited time to spend on the issues unlike their academic colleagues, for whom it is their professional lifeblood. Lewis also faces his own conflict of interest as he is building up his own web site's traffic in the area.

And both seem too ready to me to say everything is fine and all that needs to happen is for us to "dispel any ligering misunderstandings". In my view, a lot has changed in the way the system works, the amount of money at stake and the risks faced by students. Indeed, a lot of major decisions that will affect students are not actually finalised. We need to understand properly what the new system is and what the impact of the changes will be before informing potential students about it. Otherwise, we're just salesmen.

Presumably, the word "independent" in the task force's name refers to independence from government, a point Lewis has emphasised in some correspondence with me. But even that is not as clear as it could be. There have clearly been backroom discussions with the Department for Business Innovation and Skills, promotion of the task force by BIS and promises of assistance by BIS. Again, I would be much more relaxed about that if Lewis's own guidance on student loans hadn't repeated the line and errors on the Future Students website set up by BIS.

And as far as potential students are concerned, there is currently a slick central website telling them about the new system. Once the task force has got its work done, there will be a slightly different one doing the same thing. To some extent, government and universities have a shared interest: they both want students to accept the new system as a good deal and not be deterred from university.

I would be much happier if the ITSFI did the following things:

* Write to BIS demanding the withdrawal of misleading guidance on the Future Students website

* Appoint a clear majority of non-university sector people to the panel, including experts in consumer rights, debt, the law, banking and overseas student loan systems

* Appoint an informed skeptic to the panel such as the philosopher Andrew McGettigan

* Appoint a heavyweight chair with adequate paid time and support

* Commission a thorough and comprehensive report on the new system before producing any materials.

Otherwise, I suggest someone starts up a truly independent and credible task force on student financial information.

 

Update 9.30am I've had a tweet from Jim Dickinson, director of campaigns and strategy at NUS, explaining its position. He says, "We agreed to join but warned that it must stop the propaganda."