Extending yet more tentacles

James Gubb, 1 May 2007

I remember calling the LibDem’s office in Brussels a couple of months ago, asking for their education spokesperson in the European Parliament (or even an MEP with a particular interest in education) and being told there was no-one because ‘education is not an EU competence and is still the exclusive domain of member states’. This is true in the sense that the EU Commission has no independent power to propose law in this area; EU related policy on education is instead based on voluntary cooperation between the ministers of member states meeting in the European Council. Member states retain the right to veto any initiative passed in this forum and such initiatives are, at least technically, non-binding.
Yet there can be little doubt the EU is carving out a role for itself in education, coveted in particular by constant reference to teaching the ‘European Dimension’. These anomalies are typically tagged onto documents relating to the Lisbon Agenda (with its focus on lifelong learning and the like as part of the drive to make the EU ‘the most competitive economy in the world’) and various other EU-funded exchange and youth programmes. The EU budget for Education and Culture is now somewhat incredibly 1 221 270 895 euros. And then we have the Bologna Process, which has been discreetly usurped by the Commission, and subject to a damning report by the Commons Education Select Committee released yesterday.

While the report makes it clear they believe “the Bologna Process is in intention and design about comparability and compatibility and not about standardisation of higher education systems across the European Higher Education Area (EHEA)”, it goes on to state: “anxieties still exist that working to achieve comparability across the EHEA might in practice lead in the direction of standardisation or uniformity—and therefore undermine the autonomy and flexibility of the UK system”. And justifiably so. This is, it has to be said, a highly familiar story in matters concerning the EU; the famous law of unintended (or intended?) consequences that always seems to work towards harmonisation and, more often than not, tends to remove competition.
The Bologna Process aims to make academic degree standards and quality assurance standards more comparable and compatible across Europe, to make it easier for students to switch between universities in different countries. Yet, for a start, this has never been the case in the UK itself – a 2.1 degree from Oxford is not worth the same as a 2.1 from Wolverhampton. The committee’s report states: “The UK operates a fundamentally different approach to quality assurance to the rest of the EHEA and this external “arm’s length” approach is a major contributing factor to the success of the UK higher education sector.” It calls for the government to resist Commission proposals to develop QA systems across the EHEA. The Bologna Process also wants to employ a credit system across the EHEA (at a maximum of 75 credits per year), so that, for example, you could get half your degree credits from a university in the UK and half from one in another European country. But the credits system currently being proposed – the European Credit Transfer Scheme (ECTS) – is based purely on ‘hours studied’ and takes no account of different standards achieved by a student. Where, exactly, is the motivation to excel here? The report, quite correctly, bluntly calls this ‘not fit for purpose’. It could also lead to the end of one-year masters and integrated undergraduate plus one-year masters, because this would involve gaining over the maximum number of credits for a year.
Barry Sheerman MP, the chairman of the committee, had this to say: “I am deeply concerned about the expanding influence of the European Commission. The role of the Commission must be constrained if the Bologna process is to be successful.” Well said. But will the government listen? Don’t count on it. Bill Rammell, the higher education minister, has already said Britain cannot not afford to opt out of the agreement: “It is important that the process complements the commission’s strategy for higher education reform, which is all about making higher education systems more flexible, more coherent and more responsive to the needs of society”. Hmm, keep dreaming.