Students and parents deserve the truth about Britain’s education system. Successive governments have pushed generations along a single, well-worn track; through primary and secondary school, into college or sixth form and finally to university.
The underlying promise appeared straightforward: if students followed this route and graduated with a degree, higher pay would follow. Politicians of all colours repeatedly spoke of the so-called ‘graduate premium’, often referring to the familiar statistic that graduates earn, on average, £100,000 more over a lifetime than non-graduates. Labour and Conservative education ministers have argued this system is the ‘engine’ of social mobility: some organisations have even linked the role of universities in driving greater upwards mobility with ‘higher levels of employment and pay, better living standards and more‘.
Today, those assurances seem hollow. Millions of graduates are leaving university to find the toughest job market in decades. Today, more than 700,000 are out of work and on benefits. Even the graduates who managed to find a position are struggling: many are making repayments on their student loans, only to find their debt continues to rise every month. In fact, those on a Plan 2 loan must earn £66,000 annually to begin reducing their overall debt, rather than just servicing the interest. It is these circumstances that have made the promise of a ‘graduate premium’ look far from certain.
The Government has the power to reveal the truth about the system many politicians and experts have spent decades promoting.
In 2015, a group of researchers compiled a dataset known as LEO, or Longitudinal Education Outcomes, after the Small Business Enterprise and Employment Act was passed into law. The aim was clear: to ‘enable parents and students to make more informed choices concerning education and employment destinations’. LEO links education records with later outcomes, using earnings and employment data from HMRC, alongside information held by the Department for Work and Pensions.
The scale of the dataset is remarkably extensive. It covers everyone born since 1985 who has been in the English education system, and older individuals who have attended an English further or higher education institution since the 2002/03 academic year – over 30 million people in all.
So far, successive governments have only made limited figures available to the public. These statistics are heavily curated and disclosure-controlled, giving parents and students access to only a select preset of filtered breakdowns. Graduate earnings are published as nominal median figures by broad subject area, provider, and region – not by individual courses.
Even these figures are accompanied by numerous limitations. They exclude self-employment income, pool earnings across two tax years, and crucially do not adjust for prior attainment. In short, this published data only provides a partial picture of the outcomes from the English education system and does not adequately show the granular detail needed to understand what different educational paths are actually leading to.
Some groups have argued this existing level of disclosure should be sufficient for students and parents to make choices about whether to take on the debt. But the current design choices make meaningful scrutiny almost impossible. Outcomes cannot be examined properly on a course-by-course basis, nor can the impact of prior education be entirely accounted for.
The Government only allows a select group of pre-approved researchers to see the actual records. Working inside the Office for National Statistics’ Secure Research Service, these statisticians are allowed access to de-identified, person-level records. This allows them to adjust for inflation, compute medians, means, distributions, and alternative percentiles, and distinguish between those in different types of employment, further studies, and unemployment. Most importantly, it allows researchers to build a coherent view of all post-16 routes in one analysis. Clearly, highly detailed personal records should not be released publicly, given the obvious privacy concerns, but the public release of more granular, anonymised data would allow for a clearer picture of the earnings and employment outcomes different routes are actually producing.
Some in the sector, like the University Alliance, have denounced the idea that LEO data should be used to ‘provide further indicators in relation to graduates outcomes… [because] salary is a poor measure of value, and even less of a proxy for quality’. But this misses the point. Students were repeatedly told by many politicians and ‘experts’ that going to university was the route to higher pay; to now claim that earnings aren’t a reasonable measure of value is disingenuous for the millions who attended university believing they would find a well-paid job after graduation. Indeed, one member of the ‘alliance’ – the University of West London – is now in the absurd position of simultaneously being part of a group that thinks salary is a poor measure of value while calling themselves the ‘Career University’.
Releasing the records will not give those graduates their years back, but it would allow the next generation to make one of their biggest decisions in life with their eyes open, rather than clouded by partial truths propogated by various narratives.
We at Looking for Growth are clear. The Government must release the records; they must be more transparent about the earnings and employment outcomes of university, and the wider English education system. Choosing where to go to university, or whether to go at all, shouldn’t be a guessing game, but rather a carefully considered decision.
Millions of young people have had the promise of our education system broken. It is time to get the truth for them, and to stop the next generation from going to university without knowing the full facts. If you agree with us, if you agree that the least the public deserve from our politicians is the truth, join our campaign to force the Government to release the records.
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