Sir, The Government’s higher education framework risks creating a contradiction in policy towards universities (“Give students more money, universities told”, Nov 4). On the one hand, the Government expects universities to act as vehicles for its policy goals for social inclusion, skills and competitiveness. On the other, it is encouraging them to be more commercially enterprising and less dependent on public funding.

It is entirely appropriate that public funding for universities should be tied to policy priorities. But it does not follow that Government should define the missions and roles of our independent universities or specify how they should carry out those roles. Public funding represents a little over half of the £23 billion annual earnings of UK universities. Falling levels of government funding, and the rising costs of meeting the associated expectations, would ensure the early demise of any university that relied entirely on them.

Public grants are increasingly being substituted by revenues earned from research, teaching and other services sold in competitive international markets. Many universities are doing well in this competition — by definition, meeting discriminating business and individual needs.

It is not clear why the Government imposes requirements on universities with regard to selected groups of students and employers, while the needs of others are effectively satisfied through competition among a range of alternative suppliers. Tying government funding to declared policy outcomes, and encouraging universities (and others) to contract to deliver those outcomes would tap the enterprise and innovation that universities are showing elsewhere. This in turn would stimulate the wide-reaching reforms of tertiary education to which the framework aspires.

Paul Woodgates
Mike Boxall
PA Consulting Group

Sir, The absence of tutorials in some UK universities is a serious flaw in the system and is symptomatic of a mode of higher education that in general is not delivering what it is expected to and that is poor value for its tuition fees. A number of students at UK universities have no tutorials at all. They are merely expected to attend, say, eight 40-minute lectures a week, the occasional seminar and to pass the course they must submit perhaps five satisfactory essays a year and pass two examinations. This is the university system at its most “hands off”. It is certainly not worth the circa £3,225 a year the student has to pay in tuition fees.

John Idris Jones
(Retired lecturer in English)
Ruthin, Denbighshire

Sir, The Government has had responsibility for providing compulsory secondary education for all in Britain since at least the 1944 Education Act. Every year there are thousands of parents who resort to desperate measures to get their children into good schools (report, Nov 3). Does the Government have any ideas about how long it will be before there is a sufficient variety of good schools to meet the requirements of parents for their children’s education?

Nicholas Beyts
London SW7

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