ANY QUOTES USED MUST BE ATTRIBUTED TO MURNAGHAN, SKY NEWS

DERMOT MURNAGHAN:
Students will again take to the streets this week to protest against tuition fees, education cuts and possible privatisations. Thousands are expected to march on London with fears that violence could again erupt. In a moment I’ll be speaking to the Universities Minister, David Willetts about all that but also watching the discussion are our Twitter experts today, Paul Waugh, Editor of PoliticsHome.com, Kevin Schofield, Political Correspondent at the Sun newspaper and Tom McTague from the Daily Mirror. They provide their reactions via Twitter which you can read on the side panels, that is if you are watching in HD, you can follow on our website as well skynews.com/politics and of course join in using the hashtag #murnaghan. Well let’s say a very good morning to the Universities Minister, Mr Willetts, who joins us from Havant. Mr Willetts, the fact that these demonstrations are taking place again shows, as you well know, that you are a very long way from winning the argument here.

DAVID WILLETTS:
Well of course there is the right to peaceful protest and I respect that right but when you talk about winning the argument, I have to say that we have now got recent graduates going to every school and college where young people are considering going to university, we had an intense advertising campaign, we are sending out information to every school and college and it is all getting over the same message – no young person is going to have to pay up front to go to university – and I believe that that message is getting through.

DERMOT MURNAGHAN:
Getting through but still thousands on the streets. It’s not just students of course is it? I mean it’s academics and teachers as well who have been writing to you, have been responding to the White Paper with their deep concerns about this monetarisation I suppose they are talking about in higher education.

DAVID WILLETTS:
Going to university is a worthwhile experience in its own right, it cannot simply be reduced to a financial calculation, but the fact is that there is a lot of public money that goes to universities, there is a lot of public support that is going to go to students to pay for their education and a good thing too and so we are right to look at how we can best use that money and one of the things that I do care about is that students should have a proper choice, with far more information than ever before, so that they can choose the university that best suits their needs and yes, that could include new providers, further education colleges for example coming in and broadening that choice, and that’s all in the interests of students. I actually think it’s in the interests of a good high quality academic education for our young people.

DERMOT MURNAGHAN:
Let me just look at these demonstrations, I suppose a bit of a side issue but a very important one. We saw what happened last year in terms of violence at the fringes, considerable violence. What’s your message on that this time round?

DAVID WILLETTS:
Well I think it would be appalling if we had a repeat of those shocking events last, earlier in the year, I think it really would be very bad indeed. Look, everybody understands that people have a … in this country we are a democracy, there is a peaceful right to protest. It should not become violent and look, I have enormous respect and value the contribution of young people, we are actually doing this to offer young people a better deal at university with a higher quality academic experience but it would be terrible if young people played up to an unfair caricature of what they’re like when I know the vast majority of young people are not violent demonstrators.

DERMOT MURNAGHAN:
Are you concerned, they want to, we are told, head towards the City of London where there are protests, big protests of course taking place outside St Paul’s Cathedral at the moment with all the controversy that entails, are you concerned that there could be a rather dangerous cocktail building up here not just on the issue, the large issue of fees and higher education, but this general discontent that seems to be in the country about pay, about banks? Just those two issues and other issues joining together?

DAVID WILLETTS:
Well obviously there will be lots of practical issues which are operational responsibilities of the police but taking a few steps back, looking at the big picture, one of the reasons why my party was elected in government with the Lib Dem partners was to rebalance the economy. The values of our economy did go wrong, there was too much borrowing and not enough saving, there was too much trading and not enough manufacturing, there was too much importing of goods and not enough focusing on the services and goods we could sell abroad. We were living beyond our means on borrowed money, government was borrowing the money, individuals were borrowing the money and that was not just an economic mistake, it was a moral mistake as well and we are trying to tackle it. Now it’s moving out of an enormous overhang of debt we’ve inherited is a slow and painful process but we are right to do it and I hope that people will understand that our rebalancing of the economy is absolutely to be back in touch with people’s mainstream values.

DERMOT MURNAGHAN:
And of course one of the best ways of doing that is having a very highly educated workforce as I know you are trying to achieve, it’s just that a lot of people feel you are going the wrong way about it by treating students as consumers. If you do that, as consumers they may well vote with their feet and their wallet and decide it is not value for money.

DAVID WILLETTS:
When you say treat students as consumers, look, I do think students are in part consumers, I think it’s great that Which for example are going to provide them with an assessment of the sort they have never had before on the different performance of different courses at different universities and we are absolutely pressing for more information than ever before to be released. In fact I can announce today that we are going to have in the Labour Force Survey next year for the first time specific questions of people in work, which university did you go to, what are you earning now, all that information needs to be out there. But I don't think that is the full story. Ultimately going to university is a deeply worthwhile education experience and we are actually harnessing the powers of consumerism to strengthen the quality of that experience, not to undermine it.

DERMOT MURNAGHAN:
It sounds to me, I mean you will be aware, I’ve been reading what submissions Oxford and Cambridge sent you. Oxford have said this, that you have created, what you are in danger of doing is a utilitarian equation of cost and personal financial benefit but you are ignoring the public value of higher education and those kinds of tables you are talking about sound like you are doing precisely that.

DAVID WILLETTS:
No, of course going to university is partly a financial decision and because no student will pay up front and because on average graduates earn far more than non-graduates, graduates earn about £31,000 a year, non-graduates about £19,000 a year, it remains a decision that makes economic sense for many young people but that isn’t the whole story, I completely understand that. In fact because going to university has a wider social value, that’s why it’s one of the many reasons why we are continuing to put a lot of public money into backing universities, it’s why we are subsidising the loans to students, it’s why we are continuing to support strategically important and vulnerable subjects, it’s why we continue to put money behind the high cost subjects like some of the physical sciences, it’s why we continue to support research in our universities. So yes, there is a large amount of public money going into our universities, quite rightly so.

DERMOT MURNAGHAN:
Minister, just tell me about something else I’ve seen you quoted about in the papers today, I am intrigued to dig down a bit more deeply into it. It’s about the gender imbalance that seems to be building up where women, high achieving women seem to be doing men at universities and there is an article in one of the papers saying that they then tend to be marrying men or joining their partners that have not as good academic qualifications as them. Why do you think that’s happening?

DAVID WILLETTS:
Well first of all Dermot this is very delicate territory and let me begin by saying it is great that women have these education and employment opportunities, I am not against women having those advantages but there is now a rather striking gap, if you look at the statistics, where it looks as if approximately 50% of women are graduating from university by the time they’re 30 and perhaps about 40% of men. Now this is where the sociologists step in and people think through the implications of that but we have got a gap in educational performance here that goes all the way through our schools and universities and I want to see an improvement in education opportunities for men and women, but it does look as if the challenge we particularly face in our society at the moment is that the boys are lagging behind the girls.

DERMOT MURNAGHAN:
Then a challenge for a broader government policy to make sure that those well qualified women, if they do choose to have children and things like that, stay in the workforce and help Britain remain productive.

DAVID WILLETTS:
Well obviously in the long run you can speculate about the deep social trends when you have more female graduates than male graduates, it may in turn shift balance of earnings between women and men because it connects with what I was saying earlier, that by and large graduates earn more. It may lead to changes in the patterns of household living. So there are some deep questions here and these are questions which I think as a society we should focus on. What I’m trying to focus on and the government is trying to focus on is making sure we raise education opportunities across the board, it is why we are actually putting our universities on a better funding basis than ever before. If anything there is going to be more money going into our universities delivering to the wider choices of students without them paying up front and don’t forget, record number of apprenticeships as well, another great way in which people can get their way into secure well-paid jobs.

DERMOT MURNAGHAN:
Okay, Mr Willetts, thank you very much indeed, Universities Minister David Willetts there.

DAVID WILLETTS:
Thank you Dermot.