David Willetts

Responding to new Government figures on the proportion of young people at university, Shadow Innovation, Universities and Skills Secretary, David Willetts said:

“Ministers boast that they are sending more people to university this year than last. But the increase is almost wholly a result of a change to the methodology for calculating the figures.

“Labour have achieved, through the stroke of a pen, a bigger increase in the proportion of young people going to higher education than they have achieved in over ten years of multiple policy initiatives.

“I am writing to the Statistics Commission to ask them whether they have cleared the new methodology, and why a set of data that showed no material long-term increase in the proportion of young people has been dismissed without any prior warning.”

Notes for Editors

Participation rate in Higher Education (17 to 30)

http://www.dcsf.gov.uk/rsgateway/DB/SFR/s000839/index.shtml

This is the second time in two years that there has been a major revision to the methodology for calculating the participation statistics. The last time the methodology was changed, in 2007, the figures were recalculated back to the beginning of the time series in 1999/00 so that comparisons could be made over time. This has not occurred this time. (http://www.dcsf.gov.uk/rsgateway/DB/SFR/s000714/index.shtml)

In April 2008, Ruth Thompson, Director General for Higher Education in the Department of Innovation, Universities and Skills, said: ‘we are willing to explain to people why we will not reach the rate of 50 per cent participation of that age group by 2010, because we never thought we would actually’. (Times Higher Education, 17 April 2009)

ENDS