Doctor’s letter

The Observer gets excited over an old missive to the Office for Students

Another weekend and another occasion for higher education to be in the headlines. This time, an article by The Observer’s political editor Toby Helm claimed that the government had “U-turn[ed] on plans to double the number of medical students in England”.

The trouble with letting political correspondents write stories about complex sectors such as higher education is that they invariably get things wrong. The interesting thing about higher education stories written by political correspondents is that they demonstrate which university storylines have the ability to cut through to the front pages.