Forget fees, Cubie is the first step towards independence

The real significance of the report to the Scottish parliament from the Cubie committee last week is not just in the changes it might produce in the way our students are financed. And its significance certainly does not lie in whatever may happen on the rather minor issue of tuition fees.

The Cubie report tells us a lot about the current state of Scottish politics, Scottish social attitudes and the likely evolution of the our parliament over the next few years. In the careful and detailed consultation and recommendations lie the seeds of profound change.

The details, of course, have dominated the headlines, but of ultimately greater importance is the guiding philosophy of the report. This is a firmly redistributive document, and that is why the fees issue is less important than the question of student hardship and widening access.

To deal with these real problems, the committee proposes to take from the rich and give to the poor. Indeed, it proposes leaving the rich with less than nothing from the state at all - no grant, no loan, and with a continuing obligation to pay back the cost of higher education.

In exchange, it proposes numerous new ways in which the less well- off could be encouraged to gain access to higher education - grants, access funds and safeguards against having to pay back the tuition costs unless their eventual income places them in the top fifth of earners.

What's more, the report makes the link between rich privileges and poor exclusion absolutely explicit. It uses that old word of the redistributive lexicon - "progressive". It says richer people should pay more. It even says they should pay more than in the old system of student grants, which were supplemented by parental contributions, that lasted from 1963 until 1991. In exchange, the poor receive more.

The redistribution is not only through grants and loans, it is also through the committee's firm recommendation that students in further education colleges should be treated the same way as students in universities. This matters far more than it may seem. The socially accessible FE colleges already educate about one-third of students in Scotland, a much higher proportion than elsewhere in the UK. In Scotland we are slowly moving to a much more US structure of higher education - a mixture of community colleges, specialist universities and broad-based research universities.

Cubie's recommendations on equal treatment for students at colleges and universities help that unified system to emerge. They pave the way for a thorough review of the structure of Scottish higher education that could, over time, create a version of comprehensive education in the post-school sector. Such a change would be quite revolutionary.

The redistribution also concerns disadvantaged groups. There is a lot about students with dependants and disabilities. The role of the state, according to the report, should not just be exhortation, it should be about direct monetary transfers to include the excluded.

So this report articulates a philosophy at odds with the dominant political climate of the UK. That would be unsurprising if it had come from a radical fringe, but this is a committee chaired by a corporate lawyer. Its members were chosen mainly to represent the education system itself. Above all, its consultation was so thorough the conclusions can be accurately said to be the views of Scottish civil society.

What's more, we also know from the new Scottish social attitudes survey that this is also the popular view.

People in general favour public expenditure on means-tested grants, they want the dominance of loans to be reduced and regard the issue of tuition fees as peripheral to the issues of expansion and access. That capacity of the Cubie committee to focus the debate was also evident in the adept political manoeuvring that was going on around it.

One of the little-noticed changes in Scottish public life since the 1997 referendum has been the strengthening of the research and lobbying capacity of all sorts of bodies that used to be dependent for these things on friends in London. Key players in this context have been the organisations representing students, lecturers, further education colleges, university principals, and also various organisations campaigning more generally against poverty.

Not only did these groups commission research and submit it effectively, they also shaped the public debate. The most famous instance was in the week after the elections in May, when a cleverly orchestrated series of newspaper articles and briefings from the lobbying groups persuaded the Liberal Democrats that the issues were much more complex than just abolishing tuition fees overnight. But the same kind of activity continued throughout the autumn.

So what we have in the report can be fairly described as the Scottish consensus on these matters. And so we can say the Scottish consensus favours state action to redistribute resources and opportunities. To save on neologisms, we might as well call that old- style social democracy. No wonder the Conservatives and The Scotsman don't like it. If the SNP and the Liberal Democrats would only stop to think, they might see that.

They might also see that the redistributive philosophy which runs through this report is politically embarrassing for Scottish Blairites. As it is, the political group most strengthened by the Cubie philosophy is the leftist wing of the Scottish Labour party - the likes of Wendy Alexander, Susan Deacon, Sarah Boyack and Jackie Baillie, whose instincts remain to use the state for social engineering. That's also the long-term significance.

The commissioning of such a report, and its mode of operation, shows that a new style of politics is slowly, and with difficulty, emerging in Scotland, and a social democratic consensus of the type articulated here cannot forever co-exist with a UK political system based on quite different principles.

In the end, it will be that which will drive Scottish politics and culture in the direction of increasing self-government. In its first really thorough exercise in consultation, the Scottish parliament has laid the basis for its own claim to real autonomy.

Lindsay Paterson is a Professor of Educational Policy at Edinburgh University.

Copyright 1999
Provided by ProQuest Information and Learning Company. All rights Reserved.