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Leeds headteacher’s attack on university
Stephen Watkins.
A head has made an attack on plans by Leeds University to impose the maximum £9,000 a year tuition fee on its students.
He says he would not today be in the classroom if his family had faced such a burden. Peter Lazenby reports.
Stephen Watkins was a council house kid who went on to university and became a successful head teacher in Leeds where he has spent his working life.
If Mr Watkins had had to face the financial obstacles in the path of today’s aspiring working class youngsters it would never have happened.
Now he sees the university where he won his first degree making plans to introduce the maximum possible tuition fees on its students – £9,000 a year. Add to that the Government’s decision to axe the £30 a week living allowance made to students from poorer backgrounds, and the scene is set to deny a generation of working class students the opportunity of a university education.
The new university payment rules are said to make a university education inaccessible for many people and have come in for major criticism and Mr Watkins is among the critics.
Stephen Watkins is 59 and is head teacher at Mill Field primary school in Scott Hall Road in north-east Leeds.
Pressures
He has taught in and been head at several Leeds schools, among them St Hilda’s in Cross Green and Bewley Street in Beeston. Under the financial pressures being imposed on students from working class communities today, he says his teaching career would never have happened.
“I know I would not be doing the job I am doing because my father would never have allowed me to become so much in debt. I would not have gone to university,” he said.
“My dad still lives in a council house. He was a toolmaker at Crabtrees in Walsall. I was born in a council house. It was education that gave me the opportunities. When I went to college I got a grant. My dad did top it up.”
At 18 Mr Watkins attended what was then City of Leeds and Carnegie Training College, now part of Leeds Met University. His degree was presented at Leeds University. He went on to complete a Masters. He began teaching in Leeds at 22, and has been a head teacher in the city for almost 28 years.
Now he is putting his own sons through university.
“My eldest left university and became a deputy bar manager, but decided he did not want a working life in catering so he’s gone back to do teacher training,” he said.
“My middle son has finished university and is teaching in Newcastle. My youngest son is 16 and is just doing his GCSEs.
“My sons face debts of £20,000 each for going to university. Even if my dad had let me build up a debt like that I could not have afforded to move away from home as well. I am fortunate now. I have got to the position where I can afford to support them, but if I had been living on a council estate like my dad, I could not have done it.”
Mr Watkins said there had been an expectation that universities like Oxford and Cambridge would charge the maximum £9,000 tuition fees.
He said: “I don’t think they’re worth it. But for Leeds to go for the top whack is just wrong.”
He condemned the hike in tuition fees as ‘immoral’.
“It will affect people who are economically deprived – they are not socially deprived. Personally I think it is the most offensive thing ever done to students.”
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Thursday 24 May 2012
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