English higher education 2021: The Office for Students annual review

• Proceed
• Employment and unemployment: Regional issues
• Case Study: Gateway to Growth, University of East Anglia
• Lifelong learning and the new entitlement

Getting a degree gives people more choice in the careers they can pursue, and enhances their ability to contribute to society both culturally and economically. People with degrees have higher average salaries, greater job security and less likelihood of unemployment. A highly skilled workforce is crucial to the success of businesses and public services.

These benefits largely held up through the pandemic. Graduates on average still earned more, and were less likely to experience unemployment, than non-graduates.¹ However, for new graduates, employment prospects were more uncertain. Many students graduating during the pandemic found it difficult to find jobs. Some universities have reported an increase in postgraduate applicants. Hiring figures are beginning to improve but are still well below 2019 rates. The impact of the pandemic is likely to be geographically uneven and long-lasting.

This chapter explores the locally variable nature of the job market and examines a number of the more persistent employment gaps for certain groups of graduates. It looks at some of the steps being taken by the OfS and the government to identify and address these skills gaps.

Proceed

There is substantial difference in the likelihood of graduates from particular universities and colleges, and from different parts of the country, going on to a graduate job or further study.

In May this year the OfS published the Projected completion and employment from entrant data (Proceed) measure. Its findings show substantial differences between individual universities and other higher education providers, in different subjects, and in different subjects at individual universities. This provides prospective students with an indication, based on recent patterns, of how likely new entrants on a particular course will be to achieve the successful outcomes of achieving a degree and gaining graduate employment.

Proceed identifies 22 universities and colleges where it projects that over 75 per cent of entrants will go on to find professional employment or further study shortly after graduation. At 25 universities and colleges, however, it finds that less than half of students who begin a degree can expect to finish that degree and find professional employment or further study within 15 months of graduation.

Meanwhile, while 95.5 per cent of medicine and dentistry entrants are projected to find professional employment or further study, in six other subjects the rates are below 55 per cent.²

Employment and unemployment: Regional issues

Not everyone has an equal chance of getting a graduate job or going onto further study. 76.1 per cent of those from areas in the least deprived Index of Multiple Deprivation quintile – which again are not uniformly distributed across the country – found a job or further study, compared with only 69.1 per cent from the most deprived quintile. 74.0 per cent of white students went on to a graduate job or further study in 2018-19; only 69.3 per cent of black students did likewise.³

The pandemic has increased regional inequalities in employment and productivity, with tourism, service industries and retail particularly badly affected.⁴ Graduate jobs remain most prevalent in London and the south east, meaning that those who cannot move have less opportunities. Splitting the graduate population into earnings quintiles reveals that the areas with the most graduates in well-paid jobs are virtually all in London and the greater south east. All graduates in London live in the highest quintile areas, all graduates in the north east live in the bottom two quintiles, and this applies also to most of the graduates living elsewhere across the north of England.

There are also local differences in employment outcomes between black and white graduates. 60 per cent of white graduates earned above the threshold (around £23,000) or were in higher-level study, compared with 57.5 per cent of black graduates. However, in the areas with the highest graduate opportunity rates (where black graduates are almost four times more likely to live), the figures become 73.5 per cent of white and 59.9 per cent of black graduates. Among black and white graduates living in the areas with the lowest rates, the proportions are far closer to one another (52.1 per cent and 51.9 per cent).⁵

Local graduates and the OfS

The OfS has invested £5.6 million in funding to create more opportunities for graduates who seek highly skilled employment in their home region. We continue to evaluate and share emerging practice from these funded programmes on our local graduate webpages.

These projects have continued despite the pandemic, and include initiatives such as virtual career fairs in Bradford, reverse mentoring in the West Midlands, networks between graduates and small and medium-sized enterprises in Norfolk and Lincoln, virtual internships in the Tees Valley and leadership courses in Leicester. We will continue to evaluate and share emerging practice from these initiatives, and to explore innovative approaches to recruiting and retaining students.

Postgraduate upskilling

Universities and colleges have reported an increase in people applying for postgraduate degrees. Many are seeking out new job opportunities because of the pandemic.

In partnership with the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport and the Office for Artificial Intelligence, the Office for Students has funded 18 universities across England to deliver postgraduate conversion courses in artificial intelligence and data science. These courses aim to equip students with the skills they need to join the UK’s digital transformation and begin a career in an industry that has the potential to address some of the most significant global problems.

Health professions

In response to guidance from the Secretary of State highlighting professional shortages in such areas as science, engineering, medicine, dentistry, nursing and midwifery, in March 2021 we published a consultation on the funding of courses in this area, and changed our funding method in response.

The changes include increasing the proportion of funding provided through the main high-cost subject funding allocation; reducing this funding stream by 50 per cent for high-cost subjects in the performing and creative arts and media studies; removing the targeted allocation for students attending courses in London and the London weighting in our student premium funding; and increasing the targeted allocation for specialist institutions.⁶

The OfS also funded a programme of strategic interventions in health education disciplines. It started in January 2018 and ran until March 2021, with a budget of £1 million per year. The programme aimed to increase understanding of, and demand for, higher education courses in the small specialist allied health disciplines of therapeutic radiography, podiatry, orthoptics, prosthetics and orthotics.

The programme funded digital approaches to respond to the challenges raised by the pandemic, outreach events, and 15 Challenge Fund projects where universities identified innovative approaches to recruitment and retention of students. Of the 13 respondents to a January 2021 survey, the majority of course leaders for the small and specialist professions considered their course to be less vulnerable than in 2018. There are now plans to run two new postgraduate level preregistration courses in 2021-22, two new degree apprenticeship routes for podiatry, and foundation courses for therapeutic radiography and orthoptics.

Lifelong learning and the new entitlement

In line with its manifesto commitments, the government is committed to upskilling the workforce and ensuring that individuals have the opportunity to learn at all stages of their lives. This need to improve access for all adults is especially important as the number of mature students studying part time has fallen dramatically over the last decade (see Figure 6).⁷ In addition, the pandemic and resulting economic downturn are likely to lead to an increase in people looking to retrain and upskill. Applications for nursing courses, for example, have begun to rebound after recent decline. Shorter modular courses could allow people to study while fulfilling work, family and caring commitments. This will require a diversification of the pathways into further and higher education.

Figure 6: Number of mature UK-domiciled undergraduate entrants at English higher education providers by mode of study from 2010-11 to 2019-20

Source: OfS mature students datafile.

In the Skills for Jobs white paper, the government has committed to introduce the Lifelong Loan Entitlement (LLE) to make it easier for people to access training throughout their lives, and prioritise the skills employers need. The LLE will be introduced from 2025, providing individuals with a loan entitlement to the equivalent of four years of post-18 education, to use over their lifetime. It will be available for studies extending from individual modules to full years and programmes of study at higher technical and degree levels (Levels 4 to 6), regardless of the type of further or higher education provider. Under this flexible system, the intention is for people to be able to build up learning over their lifetime and choose how and when they study to acquire new skills.

In preparation for LLE delivery from 2025, the OfS is running a Challenge Competition that will trial the distribution of funding up to £2 million to around 20 universities and colleges for the development of new, short courses at Levels 4 to 6. The trial is part of the government’s piloting of access to a new student finance scheme especially designed for learners studying shorter, flexible provision in support of the development of the LLE.

Students studying on short courses developed through these projects may be able to access tuition fee loans from the start of academic year 2022-23. Over the next year we will evaluate the findings from the trial, so that the design of the LLE can be refined in the best interests of students and employers.