A leading higher education expert from Sheffield Hallam’s Sheffield Institute of Education will underline the flaws that led to the cap on student numbers being removed at an international conference in Portugal this week.
Dr Colin McCaig will present the first in-depth look at the government’s student number controls policy, which was scrapped last December and will see universities competing in an open market by 2015/2016.
The report, to be presented at the European Education Research Association’s annual conference in Porto and based on evidence from senior University managers, suggests flaws in the policy, which enabled universities to recruit as many AAB students as they wished.
Introduced by the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills as an attempt to further increase choice for students and competition amongst higher education providers, it instead led to many Universities scaling back on courses.
Another paper, ‘The Strange Death of Number Controls in England: choice and competition in a marketised system’ is due in December.
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