What a reimagined ‘university of the air’ could achieve for a modern Wales

Cerith D. Rhys Jones, Senior Manager, Policy and Public Affairs, The Open University in Wales

Today (25 February) marks 60 years since the publication of the ‘University of the Air’ white paper by Harold Wilson’s Arts Minister, Jennie Lee. That paper led directly to the creation of The Open University.

Lee’s central idea was simple and radical: that higher education could and should be available to everyone, regardless of background or circumstance. Bringing learning to the learner was fundamental to that vision. In an age when television was a new medium, she argued:

“A distinguished lecture that at one time might have been heard only by a handful of students, or a few hundred at most, can now be broadcast to millions of listeners.”

Today, broadcasting a lecture might hardly be considered revolutionary. But the deeper principle behind Lee’s thinking feels newly relevant. As debates about localism and place gain currency, we tend to frame universities’ value in terms of physical presence: anchor institutions rooted in particular towns and cities.

As we head into the fourth decade of this century, shouldn’t we also think about place more conceptually, not in terms of where universities are, but in terms of where students are? In other words, what might a university of the air look like in 2026?

After all, Wales’ tradition of community learning is a proud one, from the Rev. Griffith Jones’ circulating schools of the 18^th century to the miners’ institutes of the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries, which took care of the intellectual needs of the common man.

This question matters because today’s Wales faces a set of persistent, interconnected challenges. We have relatively low productivity, lower skill levels, and lower participation in higher education. We also have an ageing population with and a high dependency on welfare.

These pressures are not evenly distributed. The challenges facing somewhere like Torfaen are not the same as those in Tongwynlais. Porthmadog is a different place to Pontcanna; and so on.

During his Leader’s Speech to Plaid Cymru’s conference last year, Rhun ap Iorwerth highlighted a striking statistic: “I will not accept the postcode lottery whereby 48% of 18-year-olds in Cardiff North went to university last year but only 17% of 18-year-olds in Torfaen.”

I grew up in a Communities First area on the border between Carmarthenshire and Neath Port Talbot but now live in Cardiff North, so I recognise the contrast he describes.

But the statistic he quoted masks an important nuance.

Since 2017/18, the number of Open University in Wales students living in Torfaen has more than doubled (+120%).

More than half (54%) of our students in Torfaen live in the most underprivileged communities.

And in fact, we now have almost a quarter more (24%) students living in Torfaen than we do in Cardiff North.

That tells us something interesting. When you put the right support in place and offer learning that fits around people’s lives, participation increases.

Meanwhile, institutional funding has not kept pace with our ambitions for Wales, or indeed Wales’ needs. The financial pressures facing higher education in Wales are well known, and don’t need repeating here. Even for institutions like mine that benefit from operating at scale, growth in recent years has often happened despite the funding system, not because of it.

The urgency of the need to fix the system lies in the transformative power of higher education itself. Our students across Wales are studying everything from arts and humanities to professional programmes. Many are training to become teachers or nurses. Not a single one will have had to leave their community to do so. Most will have joined without prior qualifications. The vast majority rely on funding that enables them to combine study with work, caring responsibilities, and other commitments.

This is what a modern university of the air can deliver: the chance to expand horizons and realise potential wherever people are, not only where institutions happen to be located.

That principle of bringing education to where the learner is located must be combined with another important concept. Flexibility that enables fair access must be a cornerstone of the modern university experience.

Taking those two principles seriously allows us to think as boldly now as Jennie Lee did six decades ago.

There are several pressing societal challenges this approach could help address.

First, demand for graduate skills continues to grow, but employers increasingly need learning that is responsive and dynamic. One answer lies in short, stackable units of learning that can be built up over time into a full qualification. Students could work alongside their studies, with their professional experience shaping the curriculum as they go. This would better align higher education with a changing economy while widening access.

Second, many of our core public services are facing chronic recruitment and retention challenges. Teaching and nursing are obvious examples, with recent reports from the Senedd’s Children, Young People and Education Committee and the Royal College of Nursing laying bare the scale of the problem. A more flexible higher education system could allow people already working in these services to upskill without having to give up their livelihoods or leave their communities.

Third, Wales has a rich network of community assets, from schools and libraries to hospitals and community centres. These spaces are costly to maintain but are often used in isolation. Thinking differently about how they might have some capacity to support community learning, alongside other public services, could help embed education more fully into everyday life while making better use of public infrastructure. What that looks like would be different in each place, whether as study space, access to computer equipment, or something else entirely.

There are other innovations too, (some of which ought to be easy to achieve), that could make a big difference, like improving the porousness of the tertiary education system, developing a national approach to transferring academic credit between qualifications and institutions, and including modular higher study in our national skills programmes.

The difficulty is that the current system leaves little space to think or act differently. It tells us what it values through what it funds, and, frankly, this is not it. Even those areas the system does prioritise increasingly argue that it is not working for them either. They’re not wrong.

As we look towards a new Senedd term, we should recall that Jennie Lee was told that her vision was unrealistic, unaffordable, and destined to fail. But history proved the naysayers wrong and she, right. Wales now needs the same willingness to say that more of the same will not be enough. Minor adjustments will not meet the scale of the challenge.

What is required is a rebalancing of what we value, the resolve to work out how to deliver it, and the clarity of purpose to fund it properly. If we fail to do that, we should not be surprised if our problems deepen. And the future Wales won’t thank us for it.