Students like paying fees. Tony Blair understood this, and that’s why he deserves to be remembered as a great prime minister for the universities.

Mr Blair came to office in 1997, when the universities were at a low ebb. Staff/student ratios had halved over the Tory years, as had expenditure per student. Morale was poor. But Mr Blair recognised that the best universities globally are the independent universities of America, so he embraced the idea of greater independence for universities in Britain. And independence is built on fees, so he introduced top-up fees.

And, believe it or not, students like these fees so much so that applications to English universities rose by 7.2 per cent last year. Fees not only ensure that spending per student rises to a tolerable level; but they also create an expectation that both staff and students will work hard for each other.

What’s more, the higher the fees the happier the students. The results of the National Student Survey, commissioned by the Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE), published today in The Times Higher Education Supplement, show that the two most popular universities are the Open University and the University of Buckingham. These are the only two British universities that have historically charged realistic fees.

The only tarnish on the NSS has been the way the government agency HEFCE has presented the results. The survey asked every final year undergraduate 22 questions about everything from the quality of teaching to assessment. On those questions the THES put Buckingham first. Yet that was a problem for the Government because Buckingham is the only university independent of the State.

The Government produced its own ranking that curiously puts the Open University first. Why should that be? HEFCE did so by conveniently ignoring 21 of the questions. Instead it ranked the universities by answers to only one statement: “Overall I am satisfied with by the quality of my course”. That question came with five possible answers, ranging from “definitely agree” to “definitely disagree”; had HEFCE averaged the responses (as last year) Buckingham would have come top even of that one question. But this year HEFCE condensed all five responses into two broad categories, which put the State-funded Open University first.

The way the Government uses data has become controversial, which is why ministers have been forced to concede a new independent Statistics Board to reinforce trust in national statistics. But for the THES, the people of Britain might have believed that a state university had come top of the NSS. Independence matters in statistics and newspapers, as in universities.

Terence Kealey is Vice-Chancellor of the University of Buckingham

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