This evening I went to see Ed Miliband at St Mary’s Church in Sheffield. It made a refreshing change to hear someone talk frankly about their politics and answer questions both openly and honestly – he even cracked a few jokes about waiting ages for a Miliband and then two come along at once (David was in Sheffield a few weeks ago too and according to some didn’t go down so well).

I was particularly interested in hearing more about his ideas for the future of Higher Education funding but unfortunately I wasn’t brave enough to stick my hand up. The £600 million cuts to the sector translates into a 20-25% budget reduction over the next four years and I really wanted to know where he stands on the future investment of universities, colleges and research. He was (quite rightly) unsupportive of top-up fees and the cost of tuition in general proposing instead the introduction of fixed rate graduate taxes. Yet at 1-2% how does this even compare to the current cost of education? He’s not wrong when he says ‘decisions about education turn into decisions about what you can afford’ but if the government isn’t prepared to stump up the cost I don’t know how else it can work.

So because I was too scared to stand up in front of about two hundred people and ask, what did I do? Well, I tweeted it of course! I’ll let you know what his 140 character answer is… if I ever get one.

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This entry was posted on Thursday, July 8th, 2010 at 9:37 pm and is filed under Politics and tagged as education, funding, labour, twitter. Print this blog post. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a comment, or trackback from your own site.