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Universities will get cash to run courses with employers
Miranda Green
2/17/2006
 

          Universities will be given extra money to develop courses with employers, and the market for higher education diplomas will be opened to new providers under the recent "radical" plans revealed by the UK government.
Announcing the funding package for higher education during the next academic year, Ruth Kelly, education secretary, said the top priority would be "growth through employer-led provision". This could include new private provision of courses and closer links between universities and further education colleges.
In a letter to the Higher Education Funding Council for England, Ms Kelly said she wanted it to develop a long-term strategy "to lead radical changes in the provision of higher education in this country by incentivising and funding provision which is partly or wholly designed, funded or provided by employers".
The Department for Education and Skills said this could mean promoting and expanding schemes under which companies' in-house training programmes were accredited and certified by a university, as well as more two-year vocational foundation degrees.
Ms Kelly also wants to expand higher education to include vocational schemes that are funded and provided by businesses. This would, she wrote, "introduce new sources of finance that will allow us to grow the country's high-level skills base more quickly than the public purse alone could afford".
Bill Rammell, higher education minister, said the government did not want to dictate the form employer-led courses would take. But he argued that finding new ways to deliver higher education would have a two-fold positive effect: raising skills levels in the workforce and widening participation.
Alongside the expansion of business -friendly courses, Hefce was told to make it a priority to increase the number of people from low-income backgrounds who took part in higher education. "In spite of the recent progress we have made we do not perform well enough," Ms Kelly's letter said. "Low rates of participation in HE among the lowest socio-economic groups represent entrenched inequality and in economic terms a waste of human capital."
She called for greater efforts to cut drop-out rates at institutions with a high proportion of students from lower socio-economic groups, who are statistically more likely to abandon courses.
An additional £40m has been provided by Hefce and the WES to support part-time students from families who have not traditionally sent children to university. But money to promote growth in employer-led provision and widen participation would have to be found from within the funding package announced recently, the government said.
Overall, the funding council will have £6.5bn to allocate to universities in 2006-07, of which £4.5bn will be provided for teaching. Ms Kelly said the teaching grant, up 5.3 per cent on last year, would maintain in real terms the overall level of grant per student.
Universities had feared the introduction of tuition fees of up to £3,000 a year from this autumn would lead to a decrease in the money provided for undergraduate teaching by the government.
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