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Government plans for £9,000 maximum tuition fees under attack from public accounts committee and Oxford dons 3.28pm: In related news, three London schoolchildren are taking the Metropolitan police to the high court over their “kettling” of protesters during the tuition fees protests in the capital in November. Sam Eaton and Adam Castle, both in year 11, and Adam’s younger sister claim the police action infringed their human rights and the Children Act 2004 … In April the high court, ruling in a case brought by two activists relating to the G20 London protests in 2009, said there was “no reasonable” justification for kettling … The children will tell the high court that kettling broke the laws of the European convention on human rights, the United Nations convention on the rights of the child and the Children Act 2004, “mainly the right to protest and the safety of children”. _ 3.25pm: The BBC is reporting on a row between the Department for Business and AC Grayling’s New College for the Humanities over whether or not the institution can call itself a “university college”. “New College for the Humanities is not currently a university college. The college has not yet applied to use this title,” said a Bis spokesman. But the college said it was able to describe itself as a university college. “We have been advised that we may legally describe ourselves as a new independent university college, and will be working with the department to ensure that we comply with their particular guidelines on this before next autumn,” said a statement from the college … The University of London also issued a clarification about the links with NCH. “To avoid any confusion, it should be made clear that NCH is not, and will not be, a part of the University of London.” 3.16pm: In Oxford, Susan Cooper, a physicist and fellow of St Catherine’s college, has made her speech saying the government should “see through” this experiment in variable fees ( see 1.48pm ). 3.12pm: Jeevan Vasagar reports from Oxford, where lecturers are debating a motion of no confidence in higher education minister David Willetts, on a potentially incendiary speech (in the world outside the Sheldonian Theatre) from Donald Fraser, an academic at Worcester College: He calls for a return to higher education before 1992, and the creation of the new universities, and refers sceptically to a new university in the Midlands that offers courses in “cake decoration, wines and spirits appreciation” – adding, to laughter from the dons, that he knows students who already do this in their spare time. He says there are too many universities and calls for a cull. “What [the UK] does need are 40 or 50 well-funded universities and 100 or more polytechnics and technical colleges that provide a different product. Let us turn 100 universities back into polytechnics.” Universities like Oxford could offer opportunities for the “brightest students” to transfer from these new polys, Fraser adds. 2.53pm: Jeevan Vasgar has sent more from Oxford, where lecturers are debating a motion of no confidence in David Willetts, the universities minister: Robert Gildea, proposing the motion, accepted that some of his colleagues might be uncomfortable with the personal nature of the motion. But he said that Willetts had been outspoken in defending the government’s reforms and was responsible for delivering them. “That is why we are calling him to account”. He said that a higher education system based on three principles is under threat. These are: 1. Higher education is a public good. 2. Academic scholarship is pursued with a spirit of enquiry rather than a view to commercial gain. 3. Access to teaching and learning at university is based on intellectual potential. He said the government’s proposals were incoherent, promising to increase social mobility while “doing everything possible” to increase social inequality. Karma Nabulsi, seconding the motion, said: “Oxford is committed above all to the pursuit of academic excellence in all its forms, a defence of academic disciplines without regard for market values, and the idea of education as a comprehensive, publicly funded activity accessible to the widest number of young people.” She urged the academics not to consider the motion as a negative statement, “but as an affirmation of who we are and the traditions we wish to observe.” 2.32pm: Jessica Shepherd has been speaking to Matthew Robb, senior principal at global strategy consultancy firm the Parthenon Group. Robb says: More people want a degree than there are degree places so universities can charge quite high prices for places. In the short-term, that is fine, but the key question is whether the white paper will create a mechanism by which unmet demand can be supplied on a competitive basis. If the white paper manages this, then the government can reduce its costs and there will be competition, he says. He reminds us that we shouldn’t forget that “the private sector can be a real force for good”. 2.19pm: Jeevan Vasagar writes from Oxford, where lecturers are preparing for a vote of no confidence in David Willetts, the higher education minister. Jeevan writes: Journalists have been given a list of speakers. Robert Gildea, professor of modern history at Worcester College, will move the motion. It will be seconded by Karma Nabulsi, a lecturer in international relations. The academics will also be addressed by David Barclay, president of the students’ union, although students have no voting rights here. None of the speakers are expected to oppose the motion, except one, who regrets the personalised nature of the attack. Gildea has now begun speaking,with students chanting outside. Gildea has referred to AC Grayling’s £18,000 a year college as heralding the arrival of “twin track admissions – a red carpet for the rich and even more competition for everyone else. We will be back to Brideshead.” 2.16pm: On the New Statesman website, David Allen Green calls AC Grayling’s New College of the Humanities “a sham”. Careful attention reveals it to be just a branding exercise with purchased celebrity endorsements and a PR-driven website. The college has no degree giving powers, nor any influence over any syllabus for any of its degrees. The degrees which its students will study for are normal University of London degrees, which for external students can undertake at a fraction of the proposed £18,000. The college will seek access to University of London facilities, which it will presumably have to pay for at a commercial rate. So what will the student get for their £18,000? It will hardly be “face time” with the celebrity “professoriate”. Almost all of them are attached to foreign universities and have numerous other responsibilities and appointments. Indeed, in respect of the two listed law academics, neither of them are authorities in any of the seven core subjects of a standard law degree. And here is Rachel Williams’s report on this year’s league table ranking universities according to their impact on the environment. Rachel reports: A sector-wide target calls for a 43% decrease in emissions from 2005 levels by 2020, but at 63% of universities in the tables they’ve actually gone up. The average increase per university is 7.4%, and total emissions from the institutions giving figures have risen by 3.9%. All this is despite the fact that their capital funding, in England at least, is now linked to the reductions they can achieve against sector targets. 1.48pm: Jessica Shepherd has seen the speech that Susan Cooper, professor of experimental physics at Oxford, is going to give to Congregation – the dons’ parliament – this afternoon. Academics at Oxford are going to debate whether they have confidence in David Willetts, the universities minister. Cooper thinks the government should stop turning in panic “at every storm” and urges it to act decisively: Five years of trying to improve the finances of a deficit department has taught me the importance of staying calm. Some things work out worse than you had hoped and others better. Some changes initially make things worse before getting better. If you turn in panic at every storm you will only get dizzy and fall over, squashing things that would have been good. I would not have recommended a second experiment at introducing truly variable fees by raising the cap to £9,000, but we should either do the experiment or not. A market in fees would need at least a few years to reach equilibrium, given its once-a-year timescale. Issuing threats after only a few months spoils the experiment by pushing universities to £9,000 to protect themselves from further cuts. If the government really thinks it needs to abort the experiment, it should have reacted decisively by reducing the cap. But I doubt the difference between £7,500 and £9,000 is a financial disaster on the scale of the banking crisis – having embarked on the experiment, I would rather see it through. 1.44pm: Jeevan Vasagar has just sent this picture from Oxford of students protesting against David Willetts outside the Sheldonian Theatre, where their lecturers are preparing to take a vote of no confidence in the higher education minister. _ 1.37pm: David Cameron’s official spokesman has responded to the public accounts committee report ( see 11.39am ). He described the committee’s findings as “speculative”, claiming it was not yet known what fees individual universities will charge. The Guardian has confirmed with 105 of 133 higher education institutions in the UK how much they will charge, and so far the average is £8,765 a year. But the prime minister’s spokesman said: I don’t think they [the public accounts committee] have any evidence and I don’t think they have presented any evidence of a funding gap. We have set out some proposals and they will not actually be implemented until next year. Offa [the Office for Fair Access] is still waiting to hear the details from individual universities on what they are intending to charge. The reality is we do not know the detail of what they are going to charge. Some universities have declared that they want to charge up to £9,000 but I think we have to wait until they have given us information to offer. The point we do know is that the system we had before was not sustainable and there was a problem with the funding of universities and we have therefore had to take the difficult decision to increase tuition fees so that students take on a greater share of that financial burden, rather than the taxpayer. I would argue that we are in a better place as a result of these reforms than we were in the past. 1.27pm: Jessica Shepherd has just been speaking to Stewart Ward, head of the education sector at the Royal Bank of Scotland’s corporate and institutional banking arm. He says the majority of universities “didn’t have much choice” about what level to set their fees at. £9,000 was “a reasonable choice given the funding landscape they find themselves in,” he says. If student demand does fall in 2012, that will signal to some institutions that they may need to revise their pricing to ensure that their demand for places remains at a stable point to ensure an ongoing healthy financial position. The Russell Group are not likely to have any difficulty in maintaining demand at the higher fee point; however, others may have to pull back from £9,000 in future years. However, starting at £9,000 and then decreasing in line with demand is much easier than starting lower and increasing if demand is not impacted. The next 12 to 18 months will be a very significant period of time for the higher education sector. 1.20pm: At the London Review of Books website, Howard Hotson, professor of history at Oxford, has been asking whether what has happened in the US to the Apollo Group and its flagship institution, the University of Phoenix – aggressive expansion plans and “high-pressure sales culture” – are about to be replicated over here. As he says, the Obama administration is now reversing the regulatory changes of the Bush years. The UK, on the other hand, is going in the opposite direction. “Is it possible that [David] Willetts [the higher education minister] just doesn’t know what the Apollo Group was up to at the University of Phoenix? Or does he imagine that for some reason the same thing couldn’t happen here? “By removing the privileged inner circle that gets the teaching grant,” he argues, the shift from grants to tuition fees “opens up higher education to a wider range of providers doing things differently”. The explosive growth of for-profit universities was touched off by the decision of the Bush administration to give them equal access to the billions of dollars coursing through the federal student loans system. Now, the conditions are being put in place for something similar to happen here. In April, Willetts announced that, from 2012, students starting courses at private institutions will be able to take out government loans of £6,000 per year. Worse still, in September public funding for teaching in the humanities and social sciences will cease in England. The fear is that the most lucrative courses will be cherry-picked by profit-driven institutions. In the words of one strategic consultant, “England and Wales have just become Treasure Island to for-profit companies … UK students are in the business plans and sales targets of both domestic and international for-profits.” Those lucrative courses are popular, relatively cheap ones in law, arts and the humanities. 1.18pm: On the New Statesman’s Staggers blog, Samira Shackle says it’s little surprise that the government has landed itself in trouble over fees; the legislation was rushed through too quickly. Given the speed with which the legislation was rushed through, it is unsurprising that serious problems have surfaced. With Oxford University considering a vote of no confidence in the government’s higher education policy today, waiting ’til freshers’ week [to find out the impact of increased fees and loans on university finance] does not seem like an adequate solution. 12.55pm: Many in higher education are hearing that several US companies offering degrees across the pond are looking to come over here once the white paper gives them the go-ahead, Jessica Shepherd reports, although we have yet to confirm this. Universities would want to know what quality controls would be imposed on these new companies though, Jessica writes. Earlier this year, Nicola Dandridge, chief executive of Universities UK – the umbrella group for vice-chancellors – said: “The government has long signalled its desire to introduce a wider range of providers of higher education in England, including the private sector. Our universities already have extensive and productive links and partnerships with private providers. “However, we are concerned about what controls for quality there will be, and in particular we are mindful of the recent experience in the United States of opening up the market to for-profit providers. Many believe that the quality of provision among the for-profit providers in the United States has been poor, and the costs have been high, particularly in terms of the costs to students and to the state. This has particularly impacted on poorer students. “In the UK, if students at private institutions are to be able to access loans from the government on the same basis as those attending publicly-funded universities, there should be a level playing field in terms of quality assurance and regulation. “We would also be concerned if private providers cherry-picked the more lucrative courses, making it unsustainable for universities to run the less lucrative but often more socially valuable courses. “Any increase in the scope of private higher education in the UK will have to be managed carefully by government. The priority must be to protect the quality of UK degrees and make sure that our national and international reputation for higher education is not damaged. Most important of all, we must ensure that students in the UK receive the student experience they expect and deserve.” 12.42pm: On the Datablog, the Guardian’s has compiled the most comprehensive guide to what universities intend to charge in tuition fees from 2012 . So far 105 universities have declared how much they plan to charge. There are 133 higher education institutions in the UK, although Scotland and Wales have different funding systems to England. Meanwhile, Jessica Shepherd , the Guardian’s education correspondent, has spoken to Roger Brown, professor of higher education policy at Liverpool Hope University and former vice-chancellor of Southampton Solent University. She reports: Government advisers have said that the higher fees introduced in 2004 did not dampen demand for university places. But Brown warns that they need to look at whether demand is going to be reduced among teenagers from the lowest income families, not just the student population as a whole. He predicts that, with a drop in the number of 18-year-olds in the next few years, demand for university places will actually drop by 10% – to 20% in 2012, compared to 2011. One big question is whether universities are going to regret their plans to charge £9,000. Roger says the Russell Group will be fine with fees at this level, but middle-ranging universities may well not be. “Those in the middle will be struggling and will have to make discounts. They will be left with empty places,” he says. 12.34pm: Polly Curtis , the Guardian’s Whitehall correspondent, has been combing through the public accounts committee’s report on higher education funding ( see 11.39am ), and has found an interesting item with a back-story that is quite close to home. The committee calls on Hefce to be more transparent about which institutions are financially at risk. Margaret Hodge, the PAC’s chair, says: “Where an institution is at higher risk, the current practice of the funding council is to disclose nothing publicly for three years in the interest of that institution. We do not accept this practice and, where students’ investment and their education are at risk, urge earlier disclosure.” The current three-year lag on disclosure came about after a lengthy FOI battle between Hefce and the Guardian in 2007. Hefce argued that to protect current students’ interests it should be able to monitor universities finances, including keeping a secret list of universities that are deemed at financial “risk”. If people found out when the crisis was happening, the institution’s situation would be made even worse, making it impossible to manage a recovery operation. We argued that, in the age of tuition fees, students as consumers had the right to know the quality of institution they were investing their futures in. First we got the list with names of institutions redacted and wrote about it here . The information commissioner eventually struck the deal with Hefce that they should publish, but only three years later. The resulting story is here . At the time we felt we had achieved something and that it was clear from the information commissioner’s judgement that they would not budge further. But the political will could change with the public accounts committee arguing that three years is too long and students have a right to know now whether a university they are applying to could collapse. David Willetts, the higher education minister, has been clear for years that students should get better information on the institutions they are applying to and there will be more details of those plans in the upcoming white paper along with the reform of Hefce. The PAC report could just tip the balance in favour of transparency for students. 11.51am: AC Grayling (left), the philosopher and academic behind the controversial private New College of the Humanities ( see 11.24am ) is to speak tonight at an event entitled “The arts in Britain” at Foyles bookshop in central London . The protest group UK Uncut has tweeted : In london? Get down to Foyles tonight to tell Grayling what you think of his new, for-profit university idea. 11.45am: Jeevan Vasagar writes that the vote by Oxford dons would be the the most high-profile snub the university has given a Tory government since 1985, when Margaret Thatcher was refused an honorary degree. That vote, which meant Thatcher was the first Oxford-educated PM since the war to be denied the honour, followed protests by academics furious at government cuts in funding for education. Today’s vote has an equally personal element for David Willetts, who studied PPE at Christ Church, Oxford. His former economics tutor, Peter Oppenheimer, has joined the fray, telling the Observer that “I have no confidence in him, absolutely. He was a highly intelligent and thoughtful person, very able – but no politician.” The author Philip Pullman (left), meanwhile, writes on his LRB blog that he would never have gone to Oxford if the current fees regime had been in place. 11.41am: Education editor Jeevan Vasagar writes from Oxford, where hundreds of academics in traditional gowns are to converge on the Sheldonian Theatre this afternoon, to debate and vote on a motion of no confidence in the policies of universities minister David Willetts. According to the president of Oxford’s student union, David Barclay, this is not just a protest about the raising of tuition fees, but also about cuts to government funding for the arts and humanities and the promotion of a “toxic consumerism” in higher education. A white paper on universities, due imminently, is expected to encourage the introduction of more private universities. The government is also seeking to expand student numbers without extra cost to the taxpayer – and have considered a controversial proposal to let students pay for extra “off-quota” places that would not be funded by the state. Oxford is the first university to launch a direct challenge to the minister, but Cambridge, Goldsmiths and Warwick have embarked on similar exercises. If the motion is passed, Oxford’s governing body, the Council, will formally transmit a message of no confidence to the government. Barclay compared the backlash from academics to opposition by nurses and doctors to the government’s NHS reforms. He said: “Whereas the coalition and the media could play up the image of immature student rabbles causing trouble for the sake of it, nobody can argue that Oxford academics lack the necessary expertise to critique the government’s market agenda. “If motions of no confidence get taken up at other universities around the country, Willetts could find it almost impossible to withstand a wave of dissatisfaction from the very professionals his reforms are set to impact.” Students were out giving flyers to academics this morning and will greet the dons as they arrive at the Sheldonian for the 2pm debate. The vote is due to take place between 4pm and 4.30pm. 11.39am: Labour MP Margaret Hodge (left), the chair of the public accounts committee, appeared on BBC Radio 4′s Today programme this morning to talk about her report. Hodge said the expected funding gap of hundreds of millions of pounds in the short term caused by the student loans figures was unlikely to be covered by the Treasury, leaving the Department for Education to fill it. This could mean cuts in student numbers, reductions in funding for science teaching or less money going towards measures to widen participation in higher education, she said. In the longer term, the total debt held by the Student Loans Company was forecast to rise from £24bn now to £70bn by 2015-16, when the new system is in place, said Mrs Hodge. She told Today: That’s a heck of a lot of money. There are bound to be defaults, and who picks up the default? You and I, the taxpayer. Hodge also discussed the prospect of universities failing, and said students should be warned earlier if their institution is in financial trouble. If demand were to go down from students at home because they don’t want to incur the debt, or fewer people do postgraduate courses or fewer foreign students come to the UK, that could mean that some universities risk falling into financial instability. At present, the Hefce [Higher Education Funding Council for England] has a list of universities at financial risk – there are about 10 of them at the moment – but it doesn’t tell the public until that university has been in financial difficulty for three years. If you are a student and you are risking your own money to go to a university, I think you have a right to know, because otherwise if a university were to fail, you would have put your money up front, you wouldn’t get your education and you wouldn’t get your degree. I don’t think the government will stand behind a university that falls into financial difficulties. I have never known a university fail, but in the future I don’t think the government would mind if some universities failed. So I think in these circumstances it is absolutely right, when you are asking individuals to put up their money, they should know the financial health of the institution they are selecting to attend. 11.24am: A busy day today for the government’s controversial plans for higher education. A report by the Commons public accounts committee has suggested student numbers might have to be reduced to avoid a spending black hole resulting from increased student loans following the raising of the tuition fees cap to £9,000 a year. The report also said that the government had “significantly” underestimated the number of universities that will charge the maximum £9,000 a year. Figures compiled by the Guardian show that 105 universities have declared what they will charge, with an average of £8,765. The government modelled its plans on an average of £7,500. Meanwhile Oxford University is this afternoon expected to take a vote of no confidence in the higher education minister, David Willetts, in the most aggressive act of the university against the government since the Thatcher era. Jeevan Vasagar, the Guardian’s education editor, will be reporting live from the debate and the vote. Sally Hunt of the University and College Union (UCU) has said that the government has “lost the plot” on higher education. Hunt said: The government has lost the plot when it comes to higher education and unless they pause, like they did with the NHS, they will do lasting damage to the sector. It is clear they have got their sums completely wrong and that their entire funding model is in disarray. By introducing a market and cutting institutions’ budgets, the government is at risk of gambling away the future of our universities and our children’s education. And the row over AC Grayling’s New College of the Humanities – a new private university planning to charge students £18,000 a year – continues, with accusations the institution has copied University of London syllabuses . We’ll follow all these issues here as they continue to unfold throughout the day. Tuition fees Higher education Education policy University funding Jeevan Vasagar Jessica Shepherd Paul Owen guardian.co.uk