This week Liz Truss announced that, if she becomes Prime Minister, she wants the university year to begin in January. This would mean huge changes to the typical university admissions process.
Truss’s reasoning behind this is that she wants to ensure that all A and A* students are offered an interview at Oxford or Cambridge.
Presumably Truss’s system would mean that A-Level students sit their exams as normal but go through the UCAS system of interviews and offers in August after their results.
The current system works the opposite way around. Students accept conditional offers from universities prior to taking their exams and find out if they have been successful in securing a place on results day.
Controversial take
Many Twitter users have taken to the app to express their disagreement with the new system. One user wrote, “How will Oxford interview 14k candidates? How offensive is this to other universities?”
While another replied, “What makes her think that they’d all want to go to Oxford or Cambridge?”
Truss and Rishi Sunak have both been battling to become leader of the Conservative Party and, as a result, the next Prime Minister. Conservative party members have until September 2 to vote for their leader. On September 5 the new leader will be announced.
Truss’s opponent Sunak has also pledged to make changes to the education system if he is elected leader. One of these is a promise to end university degrees that do not improve ‘earning potential’. This could affect many popular degree courses including English, Art and Journalism. He has also introduced plans to ensure that students study Maths and English until the age of 18.
All these takes are controversial and future, current and former students will all have cause to question if they are change for changes sake. Or if they will actually benefit the next generation of learners.