Sources and Notes: Could Rita Afford to Be Educated Today?
This page accompanies the GOOD Thoughts article Could Rita Afford to Be Educated Today?
The article combines historical evidence, current higher-education data and the author’s first-hand experience of studying with the Open University. Personal recollections are identified as such. Inclusion here does not imply agreement with every argument made by a source. Links were last checked on 25 August 2026.
Educating Rita and the creation of the Open University
The Open University: History of the OU: supports the account of Harold Wilson’s proposed “University of the Air”, the Open University’s Royal Charter in 1969 and its founding purpose of opening higher education to people previously excluded from it.
The Open University Digital Archive: The Open University’s first ten years: provides contemporary material on the University’s establishment and Lord Crowther’s description of a university open to people, places, methods and ideas.
The Open University Digital Archive: Harold Wilson and the Open University: records Wilson’s 1963 proposal and the intention to reach people capable of higher education who had been prevented from obtaining it by their circumstances.
The Open University in Scotland: Our story: describes the early combination of television and radio broadcasts, correspondence materials and local tuition. It also records Jennie Lee’s central role and the admission of the first students in 1971.
Educating Rita was first performed as a stage play by Willy Russell in 1980 and adapted into the 1983 film starring Julie Walters and Michael Caine. Rita is fictional, but her circumstances embody the adult learner the Open University was created to reach.
Public funding and the expansion of higher education
House of Commons Library: Higher education student numbers: provides long-run data on participation, the expansion of undergraduate education and the changing balance between full-time, part-time and other undergraduate study.
House of Commons Library: Mature students in England: supports the discussion of mature and part-time participation and the barriers faced by adults returning to education.
The article does not claim that the earlier system provided equal access. Universities were smaller and strongly shaped by class, school type and prior educational selection. The distinction being made is between access to a university place and the way the cost of taking that place was financed.
Credential inflation and employment
Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development: Over half of graduates considered an apprenticeship instead of university: source for the finding that 66 per cent of graduates believed their qualifications had been necessary to obtain their jobs, while 41 per cent believed the qualifications were necessary to perform those jobs effectively.
Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development: Employers risk worsening skills gaps by requiring degrees for roles that do not need them: supports the wider argument that employers sometimes use degrees as an application filter even when graduate-level knowledge is not essential to the work.
Financial Conduct Authority: Retail investment adviser re-evaluation: confirms that the Level 4 Diploma became the standard qualification for retail investment advisers when the Retail Distribution Review came into force in 2013. A university degree is not itself the regulatory requirement.
The comparison with recruitment into banks, building societies and insurance companies is based partly on the author’s experience in financial services. It is not a claim that every financial-services employer now requires a degree or that non-graduate entry routes have disappeared completely.
Police entry routes
Home Office: Circular 002/2024, police entry routes: confirms the introduction of the non-degree Police Constable Entry Programme from 1 April 2024 alongside the existing graduate and degree-apprenticeship routes.
College of Policing: Police constable entry routes: explains the distinction between the degree apprenticeship, graduate programme and two-year non-degree programme.
The return of a non-degree route did not reduce the requirement for rigorous professional training. It changed the form in which that training could be recognised.
Nursing education and recruitment
House of Commons Library: Support for healthcare students in England: records the replacement of the NHS bursary with the ordinary student-finance system for new students from 2017. It reports that applicants from England fell by 21 per cent in 2017 and by a further 10 per cent in 2018, before later recovering and subsequently declining again. It also covers the NHS Learning Support Fund.
House of Commons Health Committee: Evidence from the Nursing and Midwifery Council: confirms that from September 2013 all newly qualified nurses would undertake degree-level education programmes and explains the professional reasoning behind the change.
Nursing and Midwifery Council: What students can expect from their learning and assessment: confirms the requirement for 2,300 hours of practice learning, approximately half of the required 4,600 programme hours.
NHS England: NHS Long Term Workforce Plan: source for the finding that international recruitment accounted for 57 per cent of new joiners to adult nursing in 2022/23. The plan also proposes expanding domestic nursing education and apprenticeships while reducing reliance on international recruitment.
NHS Employers: Pay scales for 2026/27: gives the current Agenda for Change salary ranges in England. Band 5, the usual entry band for a newly qualified registered nurse, begins at £32,073 in 2026/27.
NHS Business Services Authority: NHS Learning Support Fund: confirms the additional non-repayable training support available to eligible nursing students alongside ordinary student finance.
The article does not claim that abolishing the bursary caused an uninterrupted decline in nursing graduates. Applications fell sharply at the point of reform, later recovered and then weakened again. Recruitment is also affected by pay, working conditions, placement capacity, demographic change and perceptions of the profession.
Racism and discrimination in the NHS
Royal College of Nursing: Racism allowed to flourish in the NHS: reports 21,725 recorded incidents of racial abuse or racial discrimination against nursing staff between 2022 and 2025. Among organisations providing comparable data for both years, incidents increased by 78 per cent. In 2025, 6,812 incidents were recorded. The figures came from Freedom of Information responses and are likely to understate the true scale because reporting and recording were incomplete.
Nursing and Midwifery Council: Over half of professionals satisfied in their work, new NMC data show: reports that 53 per cent of internationally educated professionals surveyed had experienced discrimination, compared with 35 per cent of UK-educated professionals.
These sources establish the recorded incidence of abuse and the greater exposure reported by internationally educated professionals. They do not prove that any individual political statement caused a particular incident. The connection drawn in the article between hostile rhetoric and the treatment of overseas staff is an argument based on the wider political climate.
Tuition fees and the Browne Review
House of Commons Library: Higher education tuition fees in England: provides the history of the £1,000 fee introduced in 1998, variable fees from 2006, the Browne Review and the £6,000 and £9,000 fee structure introduced from 2012.
Department for Business, Innovation and Skills: Securing a Sustainable Future for Higher Education, the Browne Report: the primary source for Browne’s proposed market-based system of institutional charges, reduced teaching grants, government-supported loans and income-contingent graduate repayments.
House of Commons Hansard: Higher Education Funding and Student Finance Review, 9 November 2009: records the Labour government’s appointment of Lord Browne, the membership of the review panel and its relationship to the commitment made when variable fees were introduced under the Higher Education Act 2004.
HM Treasury: Spending Review 2010: records the planned reduction in the higher-education resource budget, excluding research, from £7.1 billion to £4.2 billion by 2014/15.
Parliamentary evidence on the higher-education market: source for the fall in the Higher Education Funding Council for England teaching grant from £4.8 billion in 2011/12 to £1.3 billion in 2017/18, measured in 2017/18 prices.
Office for National Statistics: Public sector finances, August 2019: explains the revised accounting treatment under which the proportion of student lending expected never to be repaid is recorded as government expenditure rather than entirely as a recoverable financial asset.
The Browne Review was not commissioned because of the 2008 financial crash. It had been promised earlier. The article’s argument is that the crash and the coalition’s subsequent austerity programme changed the setting in which Browne reported and made his proposed funding mechanism politically useful.
Why the maximum tuition fee became normal
House of Lords Economic Affairs Committee: Treating Students Fairly, the Economics of Post-School Education: found very little of the tuition-fee price competition envisaged by the 2011 white paper and observed that almost all universities charged the maximum fee.
House of Commons Treasury Committee: Student Loans: examines the attempt to create price competition and records evidence from Lord Willetts about the Browne funding model.
The £9,000 maximum was not formally reserved for Oxford, Cambridge or the older red-brick universities. Institutions meeting the relevant access conditions could charge above £6,000, and the maximum rapidly became the sector norm.
The Open University and S283
The Open University: S283, Planetary Science and the Search for Life: records the module’s 30-credit value, its final presentation beginning in October 2026 and its England fee of £2,044. It also states that S283 will be replaced by S287.
The Open University Digital Archive: S283 module record: records the module’s earlier presentations and continuity of its code and subject.
The Open University: BSc Natural Sciences, Astronomy and Planetary Science: provides the current degree structure, module sequence and advertised cost information for students in England.
The author remembers paying approximately £300 to £400 to study S283 around 2008 but no longer has the invoice. The historic price is therefore explicitly presented as a personal recollection rather than a documented fee. The current module description confirms the modern price, but not that every element of the teaching materials and assessment has remained unchanged. Subsequent research and space missions will inevitably have required the course content to be updated.
International students and university finances
Higher Education Statistics Agency: Higher Education Student Statistics 2023/24: source for international students representing 14 per cent of undergraduates and 51 per cent of postgraduates in 2023/24.
Higher Education Statistics Agency: Higher Education finance data 2024/25: reports non-UK tuition-fee income of approximately £12.4 billion, equal to around 23 per cent of the sector’s total income.
Office for Students: Warning against persistent over-optimism: supports the discussion of universities making optimistic assumptions about international recruitment and becoming vulnerable when demand or visa policy changes.
International students are not blamed for universities’ reliance on their fees. The article criticises a funding system that makes their recruitment a financial necessity while political debate simultaneously treats their presence as an immigration problem.
Financial returns from higher education
Institute for Fiscal Studies: New estimates of the impact of undergraduate degrees on lifetime earnings: estimates strongly positive average financial returns but substantial variation between individuals, subjects and institutions. It estimates that around 20 per cent of women and 30 per cent of men can expect a negative net lifetime financial return.
The Institute for Fiscal Studies analysis concerns financial returns. It does not measure every benefit of higher education, such as knowledge, confidence, health, civic participation or personal fulfilment. The article’s description of parts of the system as “scam-like” is an argument about the certainty implied by the sales proposition, not a claim that university education itself is fictitious.
Education, misinformation and voting
Kyrychenko and others: Profiling misinformation susceptibility, Personality and Individual Differences: a study involving 66,242 people across 24 countries. It found an association between lower educational attainment and greater susceptibility to misinformation, alongside differences associated with age, gender and political orientation.
YouGov: How Britain voted in the 2016 EU referendum: provides the educational breakdown showing substantial differences between the voting behaviour of graduates and people with lower levels of formal education.
YouGov: How Britain voted in the 2024 general election: source for Reform UK receiving 23 per cent of the vote among people educated to GCSE level or below, compared with 8 per cent among graduates.
The article does not claim that education determines intelligence or that voting Leave or Reform proves that a person was deceived. Educational attainment is associated with many other factors, including age, income, occupation, geography and social experience. The narrower argument is that education can provide practice in evaluating evidence and that educational divisions can be exploited politically.
Comparing course prices and public purposes
Kingston University: BSc Adult Nursing: gives an annual home-student tuition fee of £9,790 for 2026/27.
Falmouth University: BA Esports and Livestreaming: confirms that the course is offered and gives a UK tuition fee of £9,790 for 2026/27.
NHS Business Services Authority: NHS Learning Support Fund: confirms the additional support available to eligible nursing students, which qualifies the comparison between nursing and other degrees charging the maximum fee.
The comparison is about national need, public purpose and the coherence of the fee system. It is not a claim that esports has no cultural or commercial value, or that salary should be the sole measure of educational worth.
Author’s experience and interpretation
The passages concerning the author’s Open University studies, the approximate historic price of S283, his S260 geological microscope and his earlier entry into financial services are first-person testimony. The microscope, prepared slides and surviving course books remain in his possession.
The article’s central conclusions about public funding, private debt, credential inflation and the purpose of education are arguments drawn from the evidence above. References can establish the underlying events and figures; they cannot replace the reader’s judgement about what those facts mean.