For the past few months I’ve been lecturing part-time at a further education college and a university. Both roles will go soon, not least because one of the courses I am involved in has been axed in its entirety.
It is quite clear that my further education college is in crisis and the university is struggling not to go down the same path. Both institutions are facing cuts of about 10 per cent. In some cases that means one in ten jobs will go.
Lecturers with decades of experience are being laid off, courses are being cut and those that remain after this cull know there will be another one to come, and probably another one after that.
The issue is simple: money. There just isn’t enough. There is less coming down from central government, less then filtering down from Holyrood and this then works its way down into individual departments and faculties.
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The country as a whole is facing a similar crisis in public sector pensions. Employees are living longer and earning more and there just isn’t the money to cover all the liabilities. The anomalies in the system have also become so acute that they have to be faced. Why is it, for example, that a low-paid private sector employee has to work until 65 to raise the money in his or her taxes to pay for the pension of a counterpart in the public sector who retires five years earlier? Faced with these hugely difficult issues, Lord Hutton of Furness (formerly John Hutton, the work and pensions secretary) came up with his radical proposals this week to end final salary schemes – introducing career-average pensions instead and extending the public sector retirement age to match that in the private sector. In short, this will mean public sector workers retiring later, paying more into their pensions and, in many cases, ending up with less. Lord Hutton admitted, in a candid aside in Edinburgh yesterday, how difficult these plans were, conceding that he had had difficulty breaking the news of his proposals to his own children. He said: “I’ve got four kids, two of them work in the public sector. Do you know I have a real problem – I did have, not now – looking them in the eye and saying: ‘I’m going to go with what I’ve got, you have to work longer’. “For parents, to be in the position where you have to say to your kids ‘work longer, I go when I want’ – that is just not part of any concept of fairness.” But Lord Hutton went on to say: “I don’t want to borrow a slogan from other parties and say ‘we’re all in this together’, but when it comes to pensions we literally are all in this together. “We either solve this problem together across the generations, or we hard-wire real unfairness into the pensions system. I don’t want to do that. “We can’t go on like this, that’s my fundamental point. “My job was to tell it as I see it and tell the truth. If that upsets people, I am very sorry but my view is that it had to be told.” Lord Hutton knows that he has enjoyed – and is enjoying – the fruits of generous public sector provision. He will retire with a £30,000-a-year pension, the sort of lucrative settlement he is snatching away from his children. Despite this, though, he knows it is the right thing to do. It has to be done sometime and one group somewhere is going to get the rough end of the deal. Now compare this to the way Alex Salmond has approached the issue of university funding. “Rocks will melt with the sun,” he is due to declare today, at the SNP spring conference in Glasgow, before he would end the principle of free education. A spokesman for the first minister explained that this meant no tuition fees, no graduate endowment and, indeed, no graduate contribution of any sort, at all, in Scotland. A laudable aim, certainly, but is it really practical? Speak to anyone involved in teaching or managing a Scottish university and they are worried – very worried – about the funding gap that is already opening up between institutions north and south of the border. Yes, Mr Salmond has promised to close that funding gap from central coffers, but with even the most conservative estimates putting that gap at £200 million a year (or £1 billion over the course of the next parliament), is this something the first minister can really pledge to do or to afford to do, particularly when public finances are being squeezed? One of the main reasons why those such as Mr Salmond (and Scottish Labour leader Iain Gray) don’t want to introduce any sort of fees or graduate payment is because they had their education for free. They feel it is wrong to impose a burden on those going into universities today, a burden that they didn’t have to cope with when they were students. But this is exactly the sort of issue that Lord Hutton faced and dealt with. He didn’t want to impose burdens on his children that he did not have to face, but he saw there was no option simply because the circumstances now are very different from 50, 40, 30 or even 20 years ago. In terms of public sector pensions, people are living longer, are costing the country more in terms of pension payments and are earning more throughout their lifetimes. All this pushes up the financial liabilities faced by the whole country. In terms of higher education, when Mr Salmond went to St Andrews in the early 1970s, he was part of a cohort which made up about 25–30 per cent of the population going to university. It was affordable then. But now, with 50 per cent going on to higher education, the bill has become overwhelming and unaffordable. That is why, however difficult it is to accept, students are going to have to pay at least something towards their university education. It is hard, really hard, for those who enjoyed free education to take that away from the generation coming afterwards, but circumstances have changed so much that it is inevitable. The parties in England realised this. Both Labour and the Tories have backed the principle of tuition fees, aware that universities have to have the funding they need if they are to compete in what is now a global market place; but the leaders of our two main parties in Scotland refuse to admit it. Part of this is because of electoral concerns. Both believe that "free education" is a vote winner. It may be in the short-term, but our universities will lose out in the medium-to-longer term, as will other public services which will be stripped bare of their already stretched resources to cover the £1 billion cost of this extraordinary pledge over the lifetime of the next parliament. I know what it is like at our further- and higher-education institutions at the moment. The prevalent mood is so sombre it is almost suicidal. Everyone at these institutions is absolutely committed to the principle of education. But what many realise is that education is what counts. It is no good having free education if that is only available to a limited number of students, and that other potential students are being denied their chance of bettering themselves because the course they wanted to attend has been axed, their chosen faculty has been drained of staff and there just aren’t the places any more to cater for them. These are hard choices. Mr Salmond and Mr Gray would do well to heed the message of Lord Hutton. He faced hard choices and decided to take the right, if difficult, path. But then again, Lord Hutton is no longer running for election. As he said in Edinburgh yesterday: “I am a recovering politician.” Maybe it will take someone outside the electoral whirlpool to face these choices properly and rationally and soberly, without bowing to what they think will get them elected. Because, as it stands at the moment, neither of our leading candidates for the job of first minister is prepared to take on that challenge.Donate to us: support independent, intelligent, in-depth Scottish journalism from just 3p a day
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