Whereas I agree with the headline of what the students are protesting about, I believe essentially they are protesting against the wrong policy – it’s not the new policy which is flawed, but the policies which were instigated some 20 years ago which have led us to where we are today.

With current numbers of 18 year olds pushed into attending ‘university’ being in excess of 50%, the taxpayer frankly can’t afford the £20,000 per student cost. So rather than making students pay themselves – by whatever means successive governments have dreamed up – the policy of sending all and sundry to do four year degree courses in all and sundry should be reversed. There should only be one barrier to higher education – talent; that barrier should be set sufficiently high that only those who will most benefit from that education get to have it, for if everybody gets to go, then there is no barrier of talent, only a barrier of finance.

When I first went to college – Birmingham Conservatoire, the music college faculty of the City of Birmingham Polytechnic, in 1988 the entire number of students throughout all four years in my department – the composition department – was 10. By the time I left the Conservatoire in 1997 (by which time I’d become a part time lecturer), the entire first year intake of student composers numbered 45. Some of them were talented, but a significant number of them, frankly, I’m surprised they managed to pass their GSCE music. One of those whose work was particularly awful I noted nine years later hadn’t improved.

Also when I first went to college, there was a clear distinction between different kinds of higher education institutions and what purpose they served – universities were where the best went to spend three or four years intensively learning from an academic perspective, polytechnics were where the best spent three or four years learning from a vocational perspective, and colleges of further and higher education were where everybody else – with no slight intended upon them – spent one or two years learning how to do specific jobs, and then went and did those jobs.

But the then Prime Minister John Major had the idea that to create a classless society, he’d make everybody pay a contribution towards their higher education, and abolish the distinction between university and polytechnic. So at a stroke, hundreds of institutions across the land, previously known as prime destinations for specific courses, instantly became saddled with the stigma of being ‘new universities’, many of them having to make up silly names (and in the City of Birmingham Polytechnic / Birmingham Polytechnic / University of Central England in Birmingham / University of Central England / Birmingham City University’s case, keep making up silly names) in order to differentiate themselves from the other institutions in the same cities. That policy was extended further even now so that any old college gets to call itself a university, meaning the highly respected in its own field Birmingham College of Food, Tourism, and Creative Studies (a college of higher education) renamed itself to be University College Birmingham, clearly setting itself alongside such as University College Dublin, University College London, and University College Wales. And in the meanwhile some original universities have become less seats of learning and more seats of commerce, with education taking a firm back seat against getting in the conference business and ripping off international students.

Of course, in order to have more students in higher education (and thus not signing on the dole), you need to have more courses. And so, Golf Course Management became a university degree, as did Hair Studies. ‘Hair Studies’ is my usual example when I talk about this – I don’t mean to diminish the artform of a catwalk hair stylist who is at the top of their profession commanding in excess of £500 just to tidy somebody’s split ends, but for most people going in to hairdressing, saddling themselves with a £20k debt to get a hairdressing degree to get a £15k/year job in Chlo’sKutz  is not ‘an investment in their future’.

Society really isn’t improved by 70% of its young people going away to do degrees solely motivated by how much money they’ll be able to earn at the other end – heck, it was people being solely motivated by how much money they’ll earn at the other end which has got us into the current global financial mess in the first place! Society is improved by 70% of its young people not ‘accepting their lot in life’, but going and spending a short amount of time learning how to do something they’ll enjoy, and then going and getting paid for doing it (and thus becoming taxpayers by the age of 20), and the other 30%, the cream of the bunch, going away and getting paid – by us – to learn how to be nuclear physicists, doctors, concert pianists, mathematicians, jewellery designers, actors, and historians etc.

And those 30% who have that talent should have the opportunity to do that whatever their financial circumstances.

“LONG-serving workers at Birmingham chocolate giant Cadbury are being rejected – because the company claims they cannot spell. Dozens of so-called ‘temporary’ staff, who have been employed at the Bournville factory for up to 14 years, were forced to sit literacy and numeracy tests and told not to return to their jobs if they failed”.

Basically, this story was about how Cadbury’s recently sacked a whole raft of ‘temporary’ (some of whom had been working there ‘temporarily’ for 14 years) staff for not being sufficiently literate or numerate; they were all forced to sit literacy tests, and those who failed the tests told not to bother coming back to work.

The excuse given by Cadbury’s for this was ‘health and safety’ – apparently not being able to spell antidisestablishmentarianism and be able to calculate in one’s head the square root of 51 constitutes a health and safety risk in the modern confectionary industry. Whether this is the case or not, compare the behaviour of the modern Cadbury corporation with the beliefs and actions of its pioneers, George & Richard Cadbury. As well as the whole innovation of setting up the factory-in-a-garden and the building of Bournville Village in the first place, they were also prominent in the Adult School Movement, whereby workers were given paid time off twice a week to attend night school classes to improve their, erm, literacy and numeracy, and also allowed to study other subjects at the Day Continuation School (sited in what is now part of UCE BIAD, next to the Quaker meeting house).

I think this behaviour is worth a boycott of their products. It’s a shame really that doesn’t leave much left for a correct-thinking leftist liberal such as myself to eat in the chocolate department, what with also boycotting Nestl� and all for their socially irresponsible corporate behaviour. Looks like I’ll just be left with Green & Black’s.