Jo Johnson: Don’t betray the next generation of creatives

Creative industries in London and across the country should celebrate Monday’s Home Office announcement of the new Graduate Route visa.

The timing could hardly be better. These are crucial days in the university admissions cycle: anxious international students holding offers at London's engines of creativity - whether coding at Imperial, fashion textiles at UAL or graphic design at the RCA - are making final decisions on whether to come this academic year.

The confirmation of a massive boost to our post-study work offer should encourage many waverers to enrol this September.

International students completing a degree here from summer 2021 onwards will be able to stay on for two years (three years for PhDs) and work at any skill level. They will also be eligible to switch into work routes and stay on longer if they find a suitable job. And there will be no limit on the number of international students who can come to the UK each year.

The impact this will have in countries like India, where the duration of post-study work is a critical factor, could be sensational. It will help defend the UK’s competitive position, which has suffered gravely from Theresa May’s abolition of the post-study work visa in 2012 (following the mistaken inclusion of students in the now abandoned 100,000 net migration target).

The UK’s market share has fallen from 12% in 2012 to below 8 per cent, with countries such as Canada gaining at our expense.

Coming days after Culture Secretary Oliver Dowden announced a £1.6bn rescue package for Britain’s arts and heritage sectors, this is encouraging evidence of joined-up policy in support of the creative industries. And rightly so.

Up until the Coronavirus struck, they were growing at five times the rate of the economy and generating around 15 per cent of national gross value-added. Enabling historic palaces, museums, galleries, live music and independent cinema to access emergency grants and loans while their doors are closed is a no-brainer.

For policy to be fully joined up, however, the Department for Education must take care over how it operates recently re-imposed domestic student number controls. This risks turning into a crude process to allocate places - and therefore funding - on the basis of flawed measures of graduate earnings. This would unfairly penalise creative arts courses already in the cross-hairs of higher education sceptics in Parliament fired up by Gavin Williamson’s denunciation of the Blair-era target for 50 per cent of young people to go to university. If we have learnt anything lately, it is to value socially useful but lower-earning professions.

It would be incoherent to open the door to international talent to work across our economy, while restricting opportunities for domestic students to prepare themselves for careers in the arts. An economic nonsense too: the creative industries were generating £13 million for the economy every hour before Covid-19 – enough to repay the subsidy to arts courses in the student loan book many times over.

Our creative industries will only recover if we supply them with the skills and talent vital for their success.

Jo Johnson, former Universities Minister, is Chairman of Tes Global