A generation betrayed

The thousands of students, academics, families and trade unionists marching through London tomorrow are a demonstration of the profound opposition that exists to the government's cuts agenda.

We know that this radical, ideological assault on education risks scarring a generation.

Nearly a million young people are not in education, training or employment. In this context abolishing the education maintenance allowance (EMA), trebling tuition fees and imposing a new fees and loans system for adults who need to learn new skills to get a job is quite patently counterproductive.

But these policies aren't just incoherent.

They also represent broken promises - from those MPs who signed the National Union of Students pledge to say they would vote against any rise in fees and went on to do the exact opposite.

And from a prime minister who said he wouldn't scrap EMA but did so anyway.

We will be marching tomorrow's because we know that a market in education simply cannot work in the interests of the sector, the academics, the staff or the students.

It will mean ever-decreasing opportunities for future generations to access the education that they deserve.

We know that cuts will not work. And we're fed up of politicians who treat the votes of students and young people as something to be traded on prior to the election and dismissed out of hand after it.

The government's policies are already starting to come unstuck. The Higher Education Policy Institute has argued recently that trebling tuition fees will not actually save taxpayer money, despite the dramatic additional cost for graduates and the profound problems it is already causing the sector.

The rise in fees is not designed to bring additional funds to education. It's predicated on and justified through massive cuts in public funding, seeing the state effectively pull out of higher education altogether.

The state is left acting mainly as a conduit for student finance rather than providing finance for teaching - only a handful of subjects deemed of particular importance will receive any funds.

We need urgently to develop a new university funding model, address serious inadequacies in our further and higher education student support systems and recognise the importance of international students for our education system, welcoming them rather than treating them as a political football.

We also need to look at the ever-rising cost of accommodation - a recent NUS-Unipol report found that rents in student accommodation have doubled in 10 years and we know the cost of housing is becoming unmanageable for many, especially in London.

The government has abandoned young people - charity Barnardo's has already found young people skipping meals in order to pay for travel to college since the abolition of EMA.

This reaffirms the valuable role EMA played in helping those from poor backgrounds stay on in education.

Fundamentally we need an entirely new approach to post-16 education. A system that operates in the public interest, opening up access to high-quality education for all at times in people's lives when they are best able to benefit from it, and which is well and sustainably funded.

We need to challenge and overcome the schism between further and higher education and between vocational and academic study - working instead to develop genuinely flexible pathways into and out of various forms of education.

This is a matter of social justice, certainly. Fair access to education must recognise that not everyone is able to fulfil their potential when they are younger, and far too many are failed by the system.

But it's also a practical question. Few people know where their talents best lie by the age of 16, so closing off opportunities to change paths later in life simply does not make sense.

We must work to develop new ideas and models as to how our education system could work, and this means resisting a tendency to look back at the systems of years gone by as any kind of gold standard.

We need to look at what we can develop for the 21st century rather than hark back to a system that worked well only for a tiny elite.

And we need to think about how we build more coherent links between education and employment, recognising work-based learning as a key part of our education system.

An immediate task here involves challenging the fact that internships for competitive careers in the media, politics, fashion and finance are often entirely unpaid - making access to these professions highly inaccessible for those unable to work for free.

That's why this demo is not the end but the beginning. We need to build our movement, working all the time to strengthen the public support that exists for our cause.

And we must show by the strength of our ideas that a more positive, accessible, fairer education system, one that works for people rather than against them, is possible.

• Liam Burns is president of the National Union of Students.