Higher education needs to be depoliticised in 2018

At the SRHE conference in December, Clare Callender, professor of higher education studies at the Institute of Education, University College London, called for debates around student funding to be depoliticised. Such is the extent to which tuition fees have become an ideological and partisan issues, many of us in attendance found it difficult to conceive of discourses that were not politicised. Subsequent appointments to the board of the Office for Students have not helped this situation. So, at the start of a new year, what steps might be taken, and basic principles followed, if funding issues are to be discussed in less divisive ways?