We need technical universities in Britain

Technical university in Brandenburg

£9000 a year on university fees is not a bagatelle.

Of course the £9000 is a bagatelle to all those who send their children to public school. The worst possible public school would charge £9000 a year. To the elite riding on the establishment choo-choo into positions of influence, £9000 pounds is peanuts. Not to me. Pay £27,000 a year to go to Harrow or wherever, then pay less than that for three years at Oxford. That is the logic of these people. They have the mindset of public schoolboys and school girls and their parents.

If you want higher education to work for society you have to pay for it through taxation and the tax burden should fall proportionately on the rich and tax loopholes should be closed. That's the long and the short of it. That is realism. Raising the fees the way the elite would like them raised for the top universities will just make them into an extension of the private school system.

Almost anyone with a little spark wants to go to university. Long gone are the days when 'poor' people would agree to limit themselves. Immigrants' children want to go to university, everyone does because we live in a knowledge economy. And those who criticize media courses should keep quiet because the creative industries are 10% of our economy, video games, TV, Art, fashion, advertising, music, photography, film. White van men are a dying breed.

What really is necessary are technical degrees. Elite universities are important but they are not the solution. They just ensure that the establishment, the ruling class can reproduce itself in its children and their children and so on. But let's just forget the Bullingdon Club for a moment. The solution is to create (or re-create) a technical university system, and make sure it is funded and that it works. Michael Gove should put his mind to this  task.

 Library of the Technical University in Brandenburg

I have worked in a technical university. These degrees last only two years and they are aimed at training high level technicians. These get work placements as part of their technical degrees. When the students complete  their degrees they can easily find work; the marketing departments of the technical universities do their job properly are in close contact with companies and well aware of their  needs. later, if the student wants to and shows talent, he or she might decide to go on with their studies and become a fully-fledged engineer. 

It is the idea of the old polytechnics in a way, but these are universities.That is what we should be doing if we want to diversify this economy and tool up for very high level manufacturing again. We still have the technological seeds of success, we can act quickly. We could have these universities up and running in under six years. I know, I have seen it done and I worked with the vice-chancellor of one of them, and was a consultant for the next stage - modelled on MIT.

It would make sense to bring company sponsorship into technical universities because a lot of the technology is only accessible inside the companies. Where I was these technical universities were plonked slap bang in the middle of the very poorest areas. An example. In Belfast they still have a ship building industry. They tool up boats and ships with the very latest technology and send them out again into the Irish sea beeping happily. Now you could use government investment to beef up that activity and plonk a non-sectarian technical university in Belfast to help provide the skills.

 Interior: Technical University  in Brandenburg

British car manufacturing; we are still potentially the best in the world. Look at Formula 1. We may have sold a lot of our car companies but we are still potentially the best in the world at making cars. That is an industry the government could invest in and plonk a technical university down in the Midlands to service a rebirth.

What about Skylon and aviation? In Britain Frank Whittle invented the jet and many other things were invented here and paid for by taxpayer's money. Then the government opened up our intellectual property to US firms to take and use as the liked as part of the war effort. A mistake perhaps. 

But an invention like Skylon could reduce the cost of getting a payload into space down to less than a thousand dollars per ton, and the technology is getting very near completion. Moreover, Britain is a leader in Satellite technology. Well ditto. Support that industry and back it with technical universities and higher technical institutes.


We must think and act positively. We are in time. 

 In the 90s we all read Peter Drucker. Peter Drucker said, and it became a cliché of every government's policy, that truly successful countries were countries where knowledge was productive. In other words, the wonderful, marvelous solutions and innovations and technologies thought up in Britain's publically funded universities had to be productive and adopted by British industry.

He said, by the number of patents and inventions, if Britain had a high productivity of knowledge it would be a superpower. Now that's no joke. We have universities, not just Cambridge and Oxford, Imperial and UCL, which with government funding produce fantastic intellectual property capable of making this country a superpower.

Unfortunately, we have, according to Drucker, a low productivity of knowledge. That is the problem we have to fix. It's not really a matter of independence it a matter of putting more emphasis on the missing link between research and implementation. However, Britain is a dark horse. I am convinced that if we focused more on doing things our way and spent less time trying to roll back previous governments' work and more time on playing to our strengths, we could be an even more highly effective society.

I am a socialist, but I am also a realist. When I asked the minister of a government,  my brother-in-law, what he thought about the banking crisis and said: “Isn’t it terrible that we have to bail out the banks with tax payers money?” he just remarked: “Look. All we care about is getting the system moving again because if it stops working we are all really going to suffer. We need this thing to work and we need to get credit flowing.”

In this sense, I suppose, Gordon Brown did save the world economy. He got the bloody Heath Robinson thing going again. 'Thank God', we should be saying, after we forget the Iraq war and Afghanistan. The point is, we shouldn't sit around saying. This is crap and that is crap. We should be making real proposals for improving things. In my experience everyone I know has lots of ideas on how to make things work more effectively. That is what we should be doing. Walking on the sunny side of the street.

We did that at the weekend, when the trade unions and our sympathizers marched against the cuts. Simple. We disagree and we will use the force of our arguments to make constructive and powerful counter - proposals. If the cuts are forced through then it was because we were silly enough to vote against Labour. We can only blame ourselves for the governments' messed up priorities - watch it as it squeezes the middle. The government will get burned.

But the The Tories will back down. We've seen it before. 

Micheal Gove's interview was a bluff. They will back down in the face of mass action just like any government will. It has to show in the ballot box too.The march on Saturday was fantastic because we looked around and saw that there were so many of us who think the same way. We CAN force them to retreat because they are hanging in by the skin of their teeth, making concession after concession to the Liberal Demo-rats. When the Liberal Democrats see they are toast they will put Kennedy back into the leadership. You see Kennedy moseying round already. Linking arms with Miliband. These chaps are opportunists but they are also pragmatists and don't want to privatize everything and cut off the branch they are sitting on. The Conservatives are sitting in a very weak position. If we all heave they will come tumbling down. This is not Thatcherism because Thatcher had a big majority.These people don't.They are bluffing.

But meanwhile there are a lot of things we can do as a society to improve it. Raising tuition fees beyond a certain level is silly. Of course we want centres of excellence. But what we also need and right now are very high level technicians. There is no use producing knowledge if we can't make use of it.Let me say that to a think tank wonk or any politico who might read this.  

Read Peter Drucker. I know he is old hat to many of us, but it is not all about supporting independent centres of excellence in higher education, it is also about building a missing layer of higher education into the system and resourcing it properly so that whatever wonderful things come out of our centres of excellence we can take them up and implement them and they can find their way straight into industries, of all sorts.

We should spend less energy on fighting old battles and much more energy on solving real problems at all levels of society. And bombing Libya, Invading Afghanistan and Iraq. Well that's for the birds man. Let's get a proper knowledge economy working in this country.

The example of Skylon again. With government investment we could become the centre of the space industry because we have the technology and no one else does.  If I were a British multibillionaire I would invest 12 billion in Skylon and subsidise space technology departments in universities. Perhaps Richard Branson might do this in tandem with a couple of other billionaires and a nationalised British bank like Lloyds. Now that would be the true British spirit of intelligent pragmatism, wouldn't it? 

Is the Dam Busters March *playing in your ears yet?

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Well all that hard sell for technical universities and it turns out the government is planning to put this into practice:

"Up to 40 new university technical colleges (UTCs) could open in England, according to Lord Baker,

"Colleges will tackle "snobbery" against vocational training, said Lord Baker.This would be more than three times the number of technical colleges that had been proposed."This is an idea whose time has come," said the former education secretary, who now chairs the Baker Dearing Educational Trust and Edge Foundation.

Up until now there have been plans to create a network of 12 university technical colleges (UTCs). High speed train Projects such as high-speed trains need a skilled workforce, says Lord Baker

"But Lord Baker predicted such a strong demand for UTCs that there will be 15 to 20 colleges by 2012 with the numbers eventually likely to rise to 40.The colleges are seen as the latest attempt to develop a high-status route for developing technical and craft skills."

This needs more attention!

By Phil Hall