Chris Hill has an interesting chapter on calls to abolish Oxbridge during the English Civil War.
We urgently need a progressive programme for education that has a similar scale of political imagination & a political vehicle capable of demanding that.
Nationalising Oxbridge's (and their colleges') endowments you could do much more interesting things in HE & the education system as a whole.
Questioning the bastions of class power, whiteness and imperialism within education would allow the redistribution necessary.
Only a structural rebalancing of class power and resources within the economy and the different sections of the education system could actually work.
Yes there does need to be re-distribution between sectors but not in the way Policy Exchange think.
Apprenticeships are always used as a mirage for actual industrial policy (by both Tories/Reform and Labour tbh).
HE is blamed for the structure of the labour market. FE is systematically undermined & then used as part of a rhetorical attack on HE.
The bit on FE & apprenticeships is laughable given the Tories' terrible track record on both.
FE was actively undermined through mergers & funding cuts.
Austerity worsened deeply engrained classism that has long made FE a second class sector in terms of pay, resource and political understanding.
Behind this report is a deeply entrenched classism and elitism with deep roots in both the Tories & now within Reform (despite the some of the constituencies they represent).
This old elitism is harnessed & refashioned to suit & reinforce the fractured political geographies of class & race.
Mick brings the facts. I would like to see the presenter also correcting the lies. There should be more correction from the hosts of interviews, not simply to stand back and referee. The audience needs to be told when interviewees are not telling the truth. There should be clips like these ready.