Where’s Williamson? Thousands of students – including freshers
who will be at university and living away from home for the first
time – are locked into their halls, some with security stationed
outside their accommodation and running out of provisions. But
Education Secretary , perhaps
bruised by the A-Level results chaos of the summer, has been
nowhere in sight. Labour’s has called for
an end to his “Invisible Man act”, and indeed her Tory
counterpart will appear in the Commons at around 12.30pm to
deliver a statement on university returns.
It doesn’t sound as if ministers have an answer so far for those
students demanding refunds. While the National Union of Students
and the University College Union have said the government should
help cash-strapped universities with such requests, students are
simply being referred to the normal complaints processes at the
moment. If politicians hadn’t marketised higher education, which
leads to students understandably seeing their experience as a
commodified service and their limited contact hours as
representing poor value for money, the current situation would be
less messy.
The Prime Minister will announce a new education policy today: a
‘lifetime skills guarantee’, i.e. free college courses for people
without A-Levels or equivalent qualifications. This addresses one
of the key criticisms of Rishi Sunak’s latest coronavirus package
last week, which made little mention of training and retraining
despite how crucial that will be to the recovery (and the
transition to a more Covid-suited economy, which appears to be
what the government is now aiming for). Labour has called for a
national retraining strategy, but brands Boris Johnson’s initiative “a mix of reheated
old policies” and points out that the funding will not be
available until April.
“By then, many workers could have been out of work for nearly a
year,” the Shadow Education Secretary said. “These measures will
not reverse the devastating impact of a decade of cuts, and will
not give workers the skills and support they need in the months
ahead.” The scheme is less about mitigating the effect of
coronavirus-related unemployment, and more about filling skills
gaps in the long-term – but again the devastating impact and
urgency of the very real job losses coming next month seems lost
on the government.
By Sienna Rogers for LabourList
