School Openings: January 2022

Baroness Blackstone Excerpts

Thursday 16th December 2021 Lords Chamber

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Department for Education (Baroness Barran) (Con)]

With the leave of the House, I share the initial sentiments of the noble Lord opposite and send my condolences to all touched by the tragedy in Tasmania.

As my honourable friend in another place said, we will do everything in our power to keep schools open throughout January and beyond. All in this House acknowledge the great price that children have paid over the last two years. I hope the noble Lord acknowledges that there has been a very active communications plan about the importance of getting vaccinated and having a booster jab. We press on with that, but we are exploring every avenue. I am pleased to tell the House that over 350,000 CO₂ monitors have been delivered to schools—above our target of 300,000 before the end of term—and 99% of eligible settings now have that equipment.

[Baroness Blackstone (Ind Lab)]

My Lords, it is not very often that I am able to get up and congratulate the Government on an Answer to an Urgent Question, but I do so today because it is absolutely right. As the Answer says:

“Protecting education continues to be our absolute priority.”—[Official Report, Commons, 15/12/21; col. 1061.]


What kind of communication strategy is being developed to provide parents with the reassurance they need and to tell them just how important it is that their children continue to go to school, given what we know about absence from school at an earlier stage in the pandemic? Could the Minister also tell the House what kind of encouragement is being given to schools and local authorities to keep extracurricular programmes going? These are so important for disadvantaged children.

[Baroness Barran (Con)]

The noble Baroness is right. I thank her, and I will frame her acknowledgement of our progress in this area. The Secretary of State is absolutely clear about the importance of education, that we should do all in our power, and that the best place for children to be is in school.

On our communication campaign, we are targeting the whole nation for reasons the noble Baroness understands very well relating to vaccination and the importance, particularly given the transmissibility of the omicron variant, that all of us get boosted and jabbed. We are moving as quickly as possible with that.

On the wider issue of support, we are working very closely with schools and local authorities. We have offered them financial and practical support, particularly during the Christmas holidays, for some of the additional food and holiday clubs we offer through our schools.

Education: Industrial Strategy

Baroness Blackstone Excerpts

Monday 24th June 2019 Lords Chamber

[Lord Agnew of Oulton]

My Lords, we have protected the base rate of 16 to 19 funding to 2020 and we are putting in money in slightly different ways. For example, we are providing some £500 million this year for disadvantage funding—uplifts in addition to the base rate—and we have provided additional funding to support institutions to grow participation in level 3 in maths and additional funding for T-levels, which will come on stream in the next year or so.

[Baroness Blackstone (Ind Lab)]

My Lords, can the Minister explain why the cuts that the Government have already made were instigated in the first place?

[Lord Agnew of Oulton]

I am afraid that I did not hear the noble Baroness because of some interruptions. My apologies.

[Baroness Blackstone]

I am sorry; I shall quickly repeat it. Will the Minister explain why the cuts were instigated in the first place? I do not think that he answered my noble friend’s question about the various changes that will be made from now on. Why did the Government make them in the past?

Further Education: Teachers’ Pay

Baroness Blackstone Excerpts

Tuesday 16th October 2018 Lords Chamber

[Lord Agnew of Oulton]

My Lords, to reiterate our acknowledgment of the great role FE colleges play, more than eight out of 10 are judged “good” or “outstanding” by Ofsted and, in the most recent data, 58% of pupils leaving go on to jobs and 22% go on into further learning. We absolutely recognise that. There are a couple of figures that might interest the noble Baroness. According to the ONS earnings data—which is, of course, only a survey—when accounting for inflation, FE teacher pay in England has remained stable since 2013. The other point—to pull on some of the broader strands that the noble Baroness mentioned—is that, by 2020, funding available to support adult FE participation, including the adult education budget, the 19-plus apprenticeship funding and advanced learner loans, is planned to be higher than at any time in our recent history.

[Baroness Blackstone (Ind Lab)]

My Lords, if FE colleges are doing such a good job—the Minister says that eight out of 10 of them are of high quality—why is it that Conservative Governments always fail to resource them adequately? Could he tell the House how he thinks the Government’s industrial strategy, which is dependent on a more skilled workforce, can be implemented while FE colleges are being decimated and their staff are leaving in droves?

[Lord Agnew of Oulton]

My Lords, we have given a number of different strands of support to the sector. We have a strategic college improvement fund to help colleges improve and build partnership capacity. We launched National Leaders of Further Education in October last year, empowering the best principals and senior leaders across FE to spread their expert knowledge. We have also created an FE strategic leadership programme, run by the Education and Training Foundation, a sector-owned body responsible for professional standards in the sector.

Higher Education and Research Bill

Baroness Blackstone Excerpts

Ping Pong (Hansard): House of Lords
Thursday 27th April 2017 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Wolf of Dulwich]

First, I take the opportunity to thank the Minister in this House and the Minister for Higher Education very sincerely for listening so carefully and patiently to the arguments that I and many others put forward on these issues. I follow other noble Lords in saying that, while this has been a grind, it has also been something on which all parts of the House have found a great deal to discuss and agree. In that sense, it has been perhaps not enjoyable but certainly an educational and ultimately a positive process. I repeat that I appreciate the time that everybody in the Lords has put into this, and I very much appreciate the time put in by Ministers and the enormous work put in by the Bill team.

I am very happy to see the clause moving towards the statute book, but it seems to be slightly ill understood perhaps outside this Chamber and certainly outside this building. It might be worth my while reiterating what I think is important about it, and I would be grateful if the Minister would let me and the House know if he disagrees with anything that I am just about to say.

One of the major reasons why the Bill is so important is that it sets out what is happening in the sector, quite possibly for decades to come. That is why we have to take account of both whether it can provide innovation and new ideas and allow the sector to move and whether it can provide guarantees of quality and standards and protect students, many of whom take out large loans, and the whole country against what is always possible: that some institutions and people will not have the interests of the country and the sector at heart. Innovation is a very important part of it.

I also take this opportunity to welcome in this House the fact that the Government have recently given some money to the new model university that is being established in Herefordshire, which is enormously important because of the role it will play in helping to develop engineering skills and in working with small businesses and supply chains. It is the sort of institution that we need many more of, and I am really pleased that the Government have given their support.

It is worth remembering that one thing that has bothered us very much in thinking about how this Bill should go forward is our knowledge that it is only too easy to create a situation in which institutions arise and gain access to public funds but whose existence is very hard to justify and that can do enormous harm. It is not just this country—the United States has given us the largest and most catastrophic bankruptcies, leaving students stranded—but it is, after all, not very long ago that the Home Office moved to investigate and shut down higher education institutions in this country that were, not to put too fine a point on it, fraudulent.

This part of the Bill has always been enormously important. I am extremely happy, because it seems that this new clause will institute a quality assurance process that focuses the attention of the Office for Students on a number of critical issues when it is granting or varying awarding powers, and clarifies the importance of independent advice from outside an institution. This is always important, because an institution creates its own understandings and inevitably becomes defensive against the world. The potential strengthening and improvement of the advice that the OfS will get from outside, which will build on the QAA but will potentially be more independent and therefore both add an additional safeguard and add substantively to the process, is very welcome.

This clause also clarifies for the general public the way in which the Government envisage new institutions coming through. They clearly envisage two pathways. Many people will come through validation, a process that itself has grown up over the years with remarkably little scrutiny, but if an institution is to get degree-awarding powers from day 1, this is something of which the Secretary of State must be aware. The noble Lord, Lord Willetts, pointed out in earlier debates that anything that goes wrong tends to land on the Secretary of State’s desk anyway. What seems to be important here is that we have an extra element not just of formal accountability but one that will bring into the process both a clear ability for the Secretary of State to create a new institution that has degree-awarding powers, because that is seen as something of which they are capable from day 1, and something to make the process public and one that cannot slide through unobserved.

This is an area in which we have made enormous progress. Perhaps all this would have happened anyway, but I am extremely happy to see it in the Bill. I finish by expressing my gratitude once again to everybody who has worked on the Bill and listened to our concerns and my appreciation of all the comments, information and hard work that colleagues on all Benches of the House have put into it. I welcome this amendment.

[Baroness Blackstone (Lab)]

My Lords, I speak very briefly just to endorse everything that the noble Baroness, Lady Wolf, has said. On behalf of the House generally I want to thank her for all the hard work and effort that she has put into securing these changes. It is fair to say that this part of the Bill, in its original form, was the one that gave cause to a great deal of worry, and for me personally the most worry of all because in my view it threatened the reputation of higher education not only in this country but overseas. With this amendment, we are now in a much better place.

The only thing that I ask is that there be some monitoring of how it works in practice. It is very important that there should be some evaluation to make absolutely clear to the higher education sector as a whole, and to those who might want to enter it, that there will be rigorous tests of both quality and standards before any institution can have degree-awarding powers and access to grants and loans through the system of financial support that we have. Having said that, however, I am really grateful to the Government and to the Minister for bringing forward this amendment. It is a huge improvement to the Bill compared to what we had originally.

[Lord Willetts (Con)]

My Lords, I intervene very briefly to say that, at the end of the deliberations on this Bill, and on this important aspect of the Bill, we have ended up with a more rigorous, more transparent and more demanding regime for alternative providers in higher education than we have ever had before. I regretted that it was not possible to get legislation during the previous Parliament that would have gone alongside the initiatives that we took on alternative providers, but we certainly have a very significant regulatory regime in place now.

Higher Education and Research Bill

Baroness Blackstone Excerpts

Report: 2nd sitting (Hansard): House of Lords
Wednesday 8th March 2017 Lords Chamber

[Lord Smith of Finsbury (Non-Afl)]

My Lords, I support the amendments moved by the noble Duke and spoken to by the noble Lord. I declare my interest as Master of Pembroke College in Cambridge. I want to make three very quick points.

First, everyone on all sides of the House agrees on the importance of promoting the excellence of teaching in universities. The emphasis that the creation of the teaching excellence framework places on teaching to sit alongside research as the benchmarks of what universities should be all about is something that we all want to welcome, but the practicalities of how the Government are going about it leave, to my mind, something to be desired.

Secondly, there is going to be an inevitable crudity about the metrics that are used. The metrics that the Government are suggesting now are somewhat better than those that originally appeared in the Government’s Green Paper, but none the less they are still going to be a very crude measurement of how well a university is doing its teaching. The process of assessing research quality at universities, as the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, has said, is detailed, analytical, nuanced and looks in a very serious way at the quality of research that a university does. The teaching excellence metrics that are proposed are totally different and they are crude.

Thirdly, there will be an inevitable crudity of perception about the ratings given. The noble and learned Baroness gave a very clear example of this. I use a very obvious analogy: the curse of star ratings in theatre reviews. When we look at the top of the theatre review, we look at whether it has one star, two stars, three stars, four stars or five stars and that is, in most cases, all we look at. We do not then look down and read the analysis of how good the play really was. Exactly the same is going to happen with universities. Are they gold, silver or bronze? If they are bronze, we are not going to look at them. This is, to my mind, an impossibly crude way of assessing, as we ought to assess, genuinely, what quality of teaching is being offered by our universities. I really urge the Government to think again about this imposition of ratings, which will have a perverse effect.

[Baroness Blackstone (Lab)]

My Lords, I want to add a few words to what has already been said. I very much agree with most of the amendments in this group, and especially with what the noble Duke, the Duke of Wellington, and other speakers said about gold, silver and bronze. I also support my noble friend Lord Blunkett’s amendment, which is a very thoughtful way of trying to approach an exceedingly difficult subject.

I will repeat what I have said on numerous occasions. It is vital that teaching is given the kind of support and effort that goes into research. One thing that we have perhaps got wrong in our universities is that we have been inclined to reward research much more than good teaching. One reason for that is that it is rather easier to measure. We have publications and all the metrics that go with looking at citations and so on, which do not exist for teaching. But if we are going to go down this route, we have to get it right, because if we fail we will abandon any kind of effort to improve teaching, and that would be a tragedy.

One thing that is wrong with the approach that the Government have taken is that it feeds what is, in my view, an insatiable need for grades and ratings. There is much too much of this, and it fails to look at the very important nuances of what constitutes good seminar teaching, good lectures, a good learning environment—whether it is laboratories or libraries—and good assessment and appraisal of students. That will get lost in these sorts of gradings.

There are a couple of things that have not been said, I think, by anybody in this debate. What is the impact of this on students? What happens to the students in a university who are suddenly told, “We are very sorry, but your university has been rated bronze”? This is not like going to Which? or a consumer advice organisation and deciding that you have made a mistake in the vacuum cleaner you have bought. You can go out and buy another vacuum cleaner, but these students are stuck in the same institution, which may or may not improve. Actually, I suspect that many of them will not improve because it does not motivate academic staff to be labelled in this way. People get better in response to praise, not this sort of rather crude criticism. I am rather taken by what the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, said, about it being fine to indicate those institutions or departments within them that have done extraordinarily well, because that is giving praise and those institutions should be asked to be role models and support some of their neighbouring institutions that are not doing quite so well.

It is a bad system that is being created for academic staff and students, let alone for universities in their international recruitment. Everything that has been said about that is absolutely right. People trying to decide where to study who live in a small Indian provincial city do not have all the information that might be available to potential students living in this country so these sorts of labels will have a very big impact, and they will last for a long time. Even if an institution gets better, it will be stuck with this label for a long time before it can escape from it.

Finally, this sort of crude denomination, labelling and grading will also affect employers, who, again, do not have all the information they might need to make the rather subtle decisions about the students they want to recruit and where they have come from. They will use this and decide that a student coming from a bronze institution is not going to be as good a recruit as a student from a gold institution. That, again, seems a very undesirable situation and will damage the students not only during their time at the institution but in terms of where they are going to go in their initial and early careers.

[Baroness Eccles of Moulton (Con)]

My Lords, I want to say a few words about the teaching excellence framework, but before I do that, I want to add my comments to those already made about the huge amount of effort that has been put into the Bill already. It is very obvious that the department has been listening. Some wise words have been said today already about improving the teaching excellence framework, and I am sure they will be listened to as well. I have just a bit to add, which is more by way of explanation than of questions to the Government and suggestions for improvement. Several suggestions have been made already, which I am sure will be listened to.

Higher Education and Research Bill

Baroness Blackstone Excerpts

Report: 1st sitting: House of Lords
Monday 6th March 2017 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Butler-Sloss (CB)]

My Lords, Office for Students is a particularly dreary title. I also agree with the noble Baroness, Lady Garden, that “standards” would be better left out—but none the less, I support this amendment.

[Baroness Blackstone (Lab)]

My Lords, I, too, will get up very briefly to support the amendment. I recognise it is a lot of work for parliamentary draftsman because “Office for Students” appears about 100 times or more in the Bill as it is currently drafted, but it would give a clearer indication as to what this body is about. It is not just an office for students, as if it were an ombudsman responding to students’ needs or problems or even dealing with student finance; it is a much broader institution, which will look at the way in which higher education should operate, both as a regulator and as an instigator of new ideas, in discussion with universities, not just with students. For all those reasons it would be very good if the Government could think again about this and come back with a better title.

[Lord Elton (Con)]

My Lords, I hope your Lordships will forgive a single intervention in this whole long procedure, as I should not wish it to be thought that there were no friends of the amendment on this side of the House. The opening speech by the noble Lord, Lord Lipsey, about the direction in which this leads reminds me immediately of the two departments in the Government of Nineteen Eighty-Four: the Ministry of Truth and the Ministry of Peace. We do not want to start on that path.

--- Later in debate ---

[Viscount Younger of Leckie (Con)]

My Lords, I appreciate having a further short debate on this matter, but I find it a little ironic how in Committee many noble Lords sought to omit “standards” from the Bill, but now this amendment would add “standards” to it. I would argue that the name relates to the OfS’s core functions and purpose. In response to concerns that the mission of the Office for Students is not sufficiently focused on the interests of students to merit its name, let me assure noble Lords that the Bill places a clear duty on the OfS to consider the interests of students in every aspect of its operations.

The OfS has duties to have regard to the need to promote greater choice and opportunities for students and to encourage competition between higher education providers where this is in the interests of students and employers. It is therefore entirely appropriate that the body should be called the Office for Students—dreary or not—and that its title should signal the fundamental refocusing of the regulatory system towards the student interest which the reforms are intended to bring about.

[Baroness Blackstone]

My Lords, this organisation is not just about students’ interests. Of course they should be at the centre of it and important, but it is about the nation’s interests. There are huge externalities in having a good higher education system. It is about employers’ interests, it is about families’ interests, and it is certainly about the interests of our knowledge economy. It goes far wider. I accept that “standards” probably should not be in the title, but why not call it the Office for Higher Education?

[Viscount Younger of Leckie]

My Lords, the simple answer, which I think I made clear in Committee and just now, is that this is for students: the focus is on the students, and we want to keep it that way. We are very clear about that. That is not to say that we did not listen carefully in Committee to the views on this matter raised initially by the noble Lord, Lord Lipsey, but we are adamant that the main focus—yes, the focus can be a little broader—is on students. We are sure about that.

The newly appointed chair of the Office for Students, Sir Michael Barber, reflected in his evidence to the Education Committee that the Office for Students title is no accident. He emphasised that the student interest must be at the heart of the new office.

In respect of the alternative name proposed by the noble Lord, Lord Lipsey, I cannot agree that,

“Office for Higher Education Standards”,

would be a suitable name. As we have seen during debates “standards” has a specific meaning within the sector and is only part of what the Office for Students will be responsible for. Noble Lords have frequently expressed strong views during debate that the standards used by the OfS should be those owned by the sector—a point that we have considered carefully, and amendments have been tabled to address this.

With great respect not only to the noble Lord, Lord Lipsey, but to the noble Lord, Lord Burns, it would be highly misleading to refer to standards in the name of the regulator, and I think other noble Lords in this short debate have acknowledged that. It would imply that they are the main emphasis of its remit. I therefore ask the noble Lord, Lord Lipsey, to withdraw his amendment.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Lucas (Con)]

My Lords, I talked about this general area in Committee, but I have tabled Amendment 97 because since then I have received a fundraising letter from the development office at Oxford, which included the words: “All the evidence points to the provision of bursaries and scholarships being one of the most effective and sustainable investments we can make”. This is an outright lie. Oxford knows, as will anyone who has investigated the subject, that as far as we know bursaries and scholarships have zero effect on improving the lives of students, and OFFA will confirm this. There are many more effective ways, including a wonderful summer school run by Oxford which has demonstrably very strong effects.

I wrote back, protesting this departure from the truth and Oxford wrote back to me to confess, without admitting that it had been lying. It said that at Oxford there were no differences in retention or attainment for bursary holders, compared with those for higher-income groups. It went on to say that there were possibly some effects but that, “This hypothesis cannot be rigorously tested without creating control groups which, as OFFA recognises, would be unethical”. So Oxford is denying not only truth but also randomised controlled trials as a means of establishing the truth. This is quite astonishing. Is the development office run on entirely different ethical grounds from the rest of the university? I have been corresponding with the professor in charge, but there does not seem to be any recognition that truth or science come into the mission which Oxford should be following.

I have a general concern about all that is happening under the access schemes. I have seen several examples of universities applying for money to support what they are doing where there has not been adequate research or evaluation. At the end of the day, the main flood of money into this scheme comes from students: it is students who are funding this. Universities ought to owe them an absolute duty to be doing the very best they can to make good use of this money. At the moment, they do not collaborate or evaluate in the way that they should, and I would like the Office for Students to have the power to change that.

[Baroness Blackstone]

My Lords, I strongly support Amendment 2, tabled by the noble Baroness, Lady Garden of Frognal, and supported by my noble friend Lady Bakewell, whose salient arguments I endorse but will not repeat.

I turn to Amendment 87 in my name. At Second Reading, I mentioned how important it is to ensure that the Director of Fair Access and Participation has the independence and autonomy required to do the job effectively. Although various interventions have helped to improve the proportion of university entrants from disadvantaged groups, the gap is still far too great between them and their more advantaged peers. Eighteen year-olds from the most advantaged areas are more than two and a half times more likely to enter higher education than those from poor neighbourhoods. Put another way, fewer than one in five young people from lower income backgrounds go to university, compared with three in five from the most advantaged areas. Recent figures show that around 20% of people from low-income groups go to university, compared with 47% of all people aged between 17 and 30.

I appreciate that the Government have pledged to increase the proportion of students from disadvantaged backgrounds and are determined to improve social mobility. I do not just appreciate it; I congratulate the Government on taking this position. I know that the Minister for Higher Education is aware and is concerned about the fact that there is also a very uneven distribution of students from poor families across different universities. The most socially privileged students are nearly seven times more likely to go to universities with high entry requirements. Put another way, only 3% of disadvantaged young people go to the more selective one-third of universities, compared with 21% of those from the richest neighbourhoods. The gap is even higher in the 13 most selective universities. That is enough statistics. They mean that people from lower-income backgrounds are seriously underrepresented in the more selective universities which have the most prestige and provide the easiest routes into high-status and highly paid jobs. As long as this goes on, attempts to increase social mobility will be jeopardised.

The role of the Director of Fair Access, therefore, needs to be given as much strength as possible to achieve the changes needed. The director will be helped by new duties to publish applications, offers and acceptance and progression rates, broken down by ethnicity, disadvantage and gender. Greater transparency, leading to more information about the performance of HEIs, will be a great help, but alone it is not enough.

I can see the business case for incorporating the Office for Fair Access into what is currently called the new Office for Students—although we hope that name might change. It makes sense on efficiency grounds, but it diminishes the independence of the Director of Fair Access. In future, he or she will have to report through the head of the Office for Students, a body that universities will fund and which may therefore be less inclined to challenge HEIs generally, and powerful individual universities in particular, on issues of access. There is a risk then that he or she may be overruled on important issues relating to access. I understand that the Sutton Trust has had some assurances that this is not the intention. To be sure that this does not occur, however, a simple safeguard could be introduced by amending the Bill to require the Director of Fair Access and Participation to report annually to Parliament on the performance of the Office for Students. This would strengthen the role, maintaining both independence and accountability, so I hope the Minister, when he replies, will accept the amendment.

[Lord Addington (LD)]

My Lords, Amendments 94 and 98 in this group stand in my name. I have also put my name to the amendment of the noble Baroness, Lady O’Neill, which I agree with totally.

Of the two amendments in my name, Amendment 98 is probably the simplest to deal with. It is inspired by the fact that dyslexic students—these are just the example I use to justify this amendment—often have to go through two diagnostic assessments before they are put through to the assessment of support they get under the disabled students’ allowance. People say, “So what?”; I say, “£500 minimum charge, so what”. This is for something when you have already been diagnosed once with a lifelong condition. Apparently if you are dyslexic before the age of 16, you may, with this lifelong condition, be miraculously changed at the age of 18. I do not know why this first came in—probably because the condition was not very well understood X number of years ago—but it is there. It slows everything down, it is expensive and it probably benefits the person charging for the assessment and nobody else. The British Dyslexia Association, of which I am president, does some of this work and is prepared to forgo the charge.

I hope we will hear something that gets rid of it. Just in case there is any doubt, you go through a needs assessment when you go on this, so you have to do this twice if your parents have got round to having you checked in the first place. It is a second charge. The amendment is fairly straightforward. It is worded as it is because I am aware that it is not the case that the only absurdity on the planet is in my particular little corner of this world, so I made the amendment wide enough to get some redress there.

My second amendment is inspired by something with which I have already engaged in Committee on the Bill. We have changed the way the DSA operates and put more emphasis on universities covering some of the lower-intensity needs of those with disabilities. I have to say that the information that was not provided for the start of this year, when the new regime came in—that is, what the new regime was—has since been provided in the snappily titled Inclusive Teaching and Learning in Higher Education as a Route to Excellence. The document states clearly, over and over again, that universities have a duty in this field. The problem starts, however, when you get to what that duty actually means. There is no guidance in the document other than a statement that a few people do this fairly well. It mentions several institutions, Cambridge being one of them, but does not state exactly what they do; it merely states that they do something. I believe that about one and a half pages are devoted to the interactive and support programmes of the University of Cambridge. Therefore, there is a duty but no guidance on how to fulfil it.

I am sure that the Minister will tell us when he replies that many universities have quite good programmes, but not all of them do. The real problem starts when you go to a college which has a different regime for further education support for students with disabilities from its regime for higher education support for those who used to be covered by the DSA. If those bodies do not know what they are supposed to do, how are they supposed to do it?

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[Lord Bilimoria]

My Lords, I remind your Lordships that when the Browne report came out at the beginning of the coalition Government, the change was introduced to increase fees from £3,000 to £9,000 in one go and to convert to a loan system. I remember tabling a regret Motion at the time. The argument then was that a market would be created so that students would go for universities and courses that were better value for them, but what I highlighted in my Motion was that the Government were withdrawing funding on the one hand and tripling the fees on the other. In the five years since the change was implemented, there has been no market; universities across the board have had to increase their fees virtually to the maximum £9,000, because funding was withdrawn at the other end. For students, it was a double whammy. Their fees were tripled in one go—I suggested that it should have been phased in—and they are now saddled with loans of tens of thousands of pounds that they have to pay off. On the other hand, for the universities, there is a £9,000 figure which for some subjects—science and engineering, let alone medicine—is nowhere near enough to provide that type of teaching.

This is a Hobson’s choice. You can understand the students’ point of view—they are already paying £9,000; they were paying £3,000 and they got the loans; they do not want the fees to go up—and you can understand the universities’ point of view: they want to provide the best possible research, teaching and facilities for their students, but they have had no increase in their fees for five years. In real terms, the £9,000 is already down to just over £8,000. Now we have this further linkage with teaching.

I want your Lordships to understand that this is not easy. Universities operate in a challenging environment. We are competing with the whole world. We have the best universities in the world along with the United States of America. Our research is fantastic. I am proud of our universities, but in many ways we have our hands tied behind our backs. I applaud our students and our universities.

[Baroness Blackstone]

My Lords, I can see why the Government want to link the quality of teaching to fees. I assume that behind it is that they need a kind of sanction to do something about those universities which are not providing adequate teaching. I say to the noble Baroness, Lady Deech, that the best teaching is not necessarily provided by those universities which do the best research; in other words, the high-status universities. Some of the new universities have excellent teaching quality, where some of the best research universities do not give it enough attention.

I support what my noble friend Lord Lipsey said. It is not the right time to attach the decision about the fees that can be charged to the TEF, because we do not have a TEF that is yet suitable and up to scratch in how it will operate. It is putting the cart before the horse. There may be some date in the future when it might be appropriate for the ability to increase fees to be related to the quality of teaching, but we have not reached that point. We really need to get our metrics right and provide a TEF that is fit for the job that it is being asked to do.

[Lord Stevenson of Balmacara]

My Lords, this has been a very good debate and it anticipates another debate which, at this rate of progress, we will be able to schedule and advertise for those noble Lords who wish to come back and listen to it for Wednesday just after Oral Questions, when we will be returning to many of the themes. This is quite a narrow amendment. The amendment before noble Lords is not about what metrics could be used or other issues relating to the TEF, as it is called. It specifically tries to avoid that, to leave space for that debate to take place on Wednesday. It specifically tries, though, to break the link that might be established between any scheme established under Clause 26 and the ranking of higher education providers as to the fees or the number of students they may or may not recruit.

On a number of occasions the Minister has been at pains to point out that, throughout the very long period we kept the House sitting in Committee on the Bill, he was, in complete contradiction to the impression he gave, listening and, indeed, in some cases, reflecting. It was sometimes difficult to get the nuance between listening and reflecting but those were the words he used. We were doing the same. We have been listening to and reflecting on some of the responses we have heard to the very good cases that have been made around this aspect of the Bill, and I have to say that, having listened and reflected, I do not think he has made the case well, but the case that has been made around the Chamber this afternoon is exactly on spot.

If you want to raise the fees in higher education to accommodate the cost increases referred to by the noble Lord, Lord Bilimoria, it has been possible since 2004, and Labour’s Higher Education Act, to raise fees by inflation. It was done routinely between 2007 and 2012 by two successive Governments. There is no reason at all why the Government should not bring forward a statutory instrument under the terms of the Act that makes provision for the power to do so. There is no need, in fact, to anticipate what may be a good system for measuring higher education by linking it to the teaching quality that has been discovered by a half-baked scheme that is not yet half way through its pilot system. The case was made very well by the noble Lord, Lord Kerslake, and by the noble Baroness, Lady Garden of Frognal. The case for linking the quality of education and fees, or the quality of education and the number of students, is completely hollow. I very much hope that if the noble Lord wishes to test the opinion of the House, he will do so. We will support him.

Higher Education and Research Bill

Baroness Blackstone Excerpts

Committee: 5th sitting (Hansard): House of Lords
Monday 23rd January 2017 Lords Chamber

[Lord Willetts (Con)]

My Lords, I rise to briefly comment on the interesting and important observations we have just heard from the noble Lord, Lord Lipsey. I completely support his commitment to using statistics with integrity. There are issues about the NSS. I would argue—as I did in Committee last week—that the NSS itself is changing and increasingly has genuine questions about student engagement and academic experience. For example, I know from speaking to many vice-chancellors that how their university does on the metric of academic feedback is something they pay a lot of attention to; it reflects genuine concern among students sometimes when they do not get essays back in time and they do not get prompt feedback.

I would like, however, briefly to comment on the noble Lord’s specific point as to whether the use of the NSS, as proposed in the TEF, meets the required standards. He briefly gave a quote from the ONS on its views, saying that it would not be right to use the raw NSS data. I would like to assure him that, to my understanding, the TEF does not use raw NSS data. Using raw data simply means taking all the universities and seeing how they stand. Instead, the way in which the TEF is being constructed is to benchmark universities against similar universities. Using his own example of students from ethnic minorities, it would be possible to compare groups of universities that all have roughly similar proportions of students from ethnic minorities, so the data that will be used are not raw data. Universities will find themselves being assessed and compared with a peer group. That itself, interestingly, raises a new set of questions, but at least it means that the TEF is not exposed to the charge which the noble Lord, Lord Lipsey, has levelled this afternoon.

[Baroness Blackstone (Lab)]

My Lords, I find myself in agreement with the noble Lord. There is a slight danger that this will become a club of former higher education Ministers. However, as a vice-chancellor and former Minister, I found that the National Student Survey was a rather useful device—in a rather broad-brush way, admittedly—for telling us something about what students perceive about their own experience as undergraduates. It is not done for graduate students. I am somewhat at loggerheads with my noble friend Lord Lipsey, and I am sorry about this because normally we agree on many things. I would say that a 70% response rate that—if I understand correctly—my noble friend was quoting to be unacceptable, is a rather high response rate in most surveys of this kind. It is sometimes possible to do deep dives and find out a bit more about the group that had not responded to see whether they are in any way different in their views or backgrounds. I had not read the critique that he quotes by the ONS and the RSS. It is important that the Minister comes back and tells us whether the Government have looked at those criticisms. If not, why not, and will they in future?

I have a lot of concerns about the TEF and how it should be done. The Government are taking on a very difficult and complex task. I am not sure whether they realise how difficult it is to get reliability and validity in the responses provided. I look forward to hearing what Professor Chris Husbands, who has a lot of expertise on this, will say. I would also like to hear his response to the criticisms and comments of the ONS and RSS.

We cannot entirely take out and ignore what the NSS tells us about students’ experience. There is only a small number of questions about teaching, but there are some. There are many other questions about things that are relevant to the successful completion of their courses, including how they are assessed and examined. I hope we can look at this in a bit more depth and not completely rule out the contribution that a rethought NSS can make to any assessments of how our universities, and departments within them, are teaching, and whether it meets the kind of quality that we expect it to meet.

[Lord Storey (LD)]

I shall speak to Amendment 197, which would ensure that the TEF has to be reassessed before it is introduced. We welcome a focus on teaching. It is vital that any student in a higher education establishment gets the highest level of teaching. Given the fees they pay, it is not acceptable for students to be in a lecture of more than 100 students where the lecturer is unable to inspire or inform those students. It is not acceptable to have the practices that go with poor teaching, whether it be poor marking of dissertations and essays, or late return of those pieces of work. Teaching quality has to be at the heart of the university experience for young people.

Our concern is that employment outcomes do not give an insight into teaching excellence, nor does retention. We have had this discussion on previous amendments. I am not totally averse to a student survey—it is about the questions that it asks. If it asked questions that challenged the student to think properly about their teaching experience, about how they were challenged and how the subject was put across to them, rather than easy tick-box answers, that would be a proper student survey. The student survey would have to be a very small part of the metrics.

As I said, Amendment 197 would ensure that the TEF has to be reassessed before it is introduced. It follows an amendment tabled by Paul Blomfield in the Commons on Report. He stated:

“Amendment 50 reflects concern over the reliability of the metrics used to measure teaching excellence”.


He emphasised many times in Committee, that,

“we all welcome the Government’s focus on teaching excellence, and we can all work effectively together on the principle of the teaching excellence framework. However, the metrics on employment outcomes, on retention and on the national student satisfaction survey have been identified by the Government themselves as a proxy for teaching excellence.

The amendment simply seeks to add to the Bill a requirement that the metrics used by the Government to determine teaching quality should have a demonstrable link to teaching excellence. This was the unanimous recommendation of the then Business, Innovation and Skills Committee … We all agree that employment outcomes do not necessarily demonstrate teaching excellence. There are also enormous regional variations in employment outcomes and salary levels. The Minister will know that someone who comes from the right family and goes to the right school and university could have an awful teaching experience but still get a decent job. The converse is also true. People who do not come from the right family and who do not go to what many see as the right university could have an excellent teaching experience but not command such high salary levels. So employment outcomes are a crude and almost perverse proxy measure of teaching excellence. I would therefore welcome the Minister’s observations on why this simple amendment to introduce a demonstrable link between the metrics and teaching excellence would not strengthen the Bill and will not be accepted by the Government”.—[Official Report, Commons, 21/11/16; cols. 626-27.]

Higher Education and Research Bill

Baroness Blackstone Excerpts

Committee: 2nd sitting (Hansard): House of Lords
Wednesday 11th January 2017 Lords Chamber

[Lord Giddens (Lab)]

My Lords, I support these amendments and will elaborate on what I said at Second Reading about the likely impact of the digital revolution on higher education, which will potentially be absolutely fundamental and possibly as great as it has been in any other area of society and the economy.

Traditionally, part-time and distance learning have been seen as a kind of adjunct to “proper” university education, which is full-time and campus-based. That separation is likely to break down more and more radically, and in the near future rather than the distant one. Indeed, the whole structure of higher education could become fundamentally transformed. Somebody must track these trends and try to work out their implications.

In the US, 4 million undergraduates in 2016 took at least one course online—one-quarter of the total undergraduate body, and that is expected to grow to one-half within the next five years. It has been said—Americans have a way with words—that this has produced “bricks for the rich and clicks for the poor”. However, if that division is a fundamental one, it is rapidly dissolving, as digital learning increasingly becomes part of the day-to-day experience in the top-level universities.

Something huge is going on here; it is “don’t know” territory, but it will be radical. Can the Minister say how, in this Bill, the Government propose to track these trends and work out their implications for students, many of whom pay £50,000 for an experience which may become to some extent obsolete? We do not know how far the campus-based university will survive, but it will be radically transformed.

[Baroness Blackstone (Lab)]

My Lords, I associate myself with these amendments and support what has been said so far. I particularly support what my noble friend Lord Blunkett said—I worked with him as a Minister in the Department for Education and Employment, as it then was—and what my noble friend Lady Bakewell said. I was the master of Birkbeck for nearly a decade, and from that experience I will say something about mature students who study part-time. These people give up a huge amount of their leisure time; they sacrifice all that to work and study at the same time. Incidentally, Birkbeck is coming up to its 200th anniversary. It was set up as a working men’s institute for men who worked by day and studied by night. It has continued in that way, but adding women in the 1830s.

We have to get away from the notion that university and higher education is primarily about full-time study. There may be a somewhat higher proportion of students studying full time. But, as my noble friend Lord Giddens has just said, things are changing and we are going to see far more part-time students in the coming years, partly because some students will not want to take on the enormous debt involved today in undertaking an undergraduate programme but also because the changes in the wider environment will require them to return to part-time higher education to improve their knowledge and update their skills. Only if they do that will they be able to truly contribute to the knowledge economy.

My noble friend Lord Winston referred to part-time students being between the ages of 30 and 60. I did a little preparation before I went to Birkbeck. I went to the University of Toronto—the Canadian university that specialises in part-time and mature students—and was told that the oldest student there was 92. I asked whether I could meet her. They said they were terribly sorry but she was travelling in Europe—so I did not get that opportunity. So I say to noble Lords, “It’s never too late, so think about it”.

[Baroness Lister of Burtersett (Lab)]

My Lords, I shall speak in support of Amendments 41, 46 and 172, which all relate to part-time and mature students. The Minister, both on Monday and at Second Reading, assured noble Lords that the Government recognise the importance of part-time education and lifelong learning. But at Second Reading he did not deal with the concerns expressed across the House about the Bill’s failure to address the needs of this group of students. That is all the more surprising given the emphasis that the Prime Minister has placed on social mobility.

It might be appropriate to quote from the Social Mobility Commission’s recent State of the Nation report, which says that,

“if universities are going to contribute to transforming social mobility in this country, they need to embrace a broader, more ambitious social role. For example, they need to look at increasing both access to and availability of part-time study for those who want to access HE while working or fulfilling caring responsibilities”.

Here, in parentheses, I draw particular attention to the needs of lone mothers. The report continues:

“Students from less advantaged backgrounds are more likely to be part-time and/or mature students, as they have had less opportunity to study earlier in life or need the flexibility of earning alongside studying. Adult and part-time study is also important in helping an older workforce”—

as we have heard—

“likely to work longer and across different sectors across their career, to reskill or upskill—as pointed out by the recent report on social mobility by Universities UK. However, the last ten years have seen a significant drop in both part-time and mature student participation in the HE sector. This is not only a huge loss of human potential, but also a loss to the economy”.

It is indeed a significant drop, as the noble Baroness, Lady Garden of Frognal, underlined earlier. Taking slightly different dates, it is a drop of 55% between 2010-11 and 2014-15. When the Minister responds, can he give us his explanation of this drop and say what the Government are doing about it, given its importance to their social mobility agenda? In view of the drop and the Government’s own Social Mobility Commission’s concerns, will he undertake to consider these amendments with a view to tabling a government amendment on Report that will ensure that the OfS has due regard to promoting part-time and mature study?

--- Later in debate ---

[Viscount Younger of Leckie]

The noble Lord is right. It certainly is not second rate, but I must say again that many of the other types of people who want to learn—many were mentioned today, including lone mothers—must be considered as well. That leads into a completely separate debate as to who you give priority to. The whole point of our reforms is that the OfS will be given this broad scope to cover everybody who might fall into these categories. Far from being second rate, it is very important, and I hope I have made that clear to the Committee.

[Baroness Blackstone]

I assume from what the Minister said he will not accept any of these amendments. As someone who has been involved in policy in this area, as both a provider and a politician, part-time studies always take second place in all the thinking that is ever done. That is true of officials, UUK and many universities. If the Government want to see part-time higher education and mature students playing a bigger part, which I greatly welcome, I cannot understand why the Minister is resisting making sure that there will be somebody in the Office for Students who will speak up for this form of higher education, who has knowledge and expertise about it and who will work with his or her colleagues to make sure it is promoted and gets its rightful place. If the Government do not accept this, I fear that, whatever he may say about their commitment, this will not happen in practice. Will he explain to the Committee why he is resisting accepting the amendments?

[Viscount Younger of Leckie]

I think I have done that. The whole point is I want to avoid placing undue restrictions on the OfS. I hope I have formed a strong argument that, in the way we have formed a new framework for the OfS and with the make-up of the new board, the skills and expertise on the board will give due reference to not just part-time workers but all the other groups caught and spoken about this afternoon. We do not feel it is right to place undue restrictions on the OfS. To that extent, I ask noble Lords not to press their amendments.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Willis of Knaresborough (LD)]

My Lords, I did not mean to speak on this part of the Bill, and was absent at Second Reading, but I want to raise a key issue that follows on from the noble Baroness. With previous Acts of Parliament, and when we set up OFFA, we were totally consumed by the whole idea that access to higher education was about getting into Oxford and Cambridge, and that has bedevilled the whole system.

What worries me about what is being proposed at the moment—this was referred to in our earlier debate by the noble Lords, Lord Rees and Lord Lucas— is what happens not with individual universities but between universities. Quite often we see students from poorer backgrounds, or indeed from all backgrounds, who gain credits in parts of courses but then move, either with their spouse or because they want to move for work elsewhere, and find that the pre-learning that they worked very hard for is simply not accepted in other universities. The noble Lord, Lord Rees, mentioned the California situation, which applies in virtually all the community colleges in the United States, where those accumulated credits can be used and cashed in, not simply at other community colleges but at universities right up to the very highest levels, including the Ivy League, because those are high-class students. Unless we start to think about this office as dealing not with single universities but with the whole of the higher education sector, and encourage higher education institutions to work together for the benefit of all students, then, frankly, we will have missed a great opportunity to make a fundamental change to the way in which we look at the whole system rather than at individual institutions.

[Baroness Blackstone]

My Lords, I would like to make a couple of comments on what has been said so far. I want to associate myself with a great deal of what the noble Lord, Lord Willetts, said. It is of course the case that if we are concerned about social mobility and allowing young people—or indeed older people, to go back to our earlier debate—who have come from social backgrounds where they have been underrepresented in higher education, we have not just to focus on their access in the sense of their admission to university and what is done to reach out to schools in poorer areas, what is done to help schools to have homework clubs, for example, or summer schools in their neighbouring university, but to work on how we can help these students to progress through their entire course. That may mean giving some help with funding when they run into particular financial difficulties. It may mean giving them extra help in particular subjects that they are finding difficult. It may mean providing vacation programmes for them.

However, it also means something that has not been mentioned yet: helping them, when they get to the end of their course, to identify what their future careers may be and how to progress to what they want to do. Many of these young people will not have the networks that their more advantaged peers have who come from homes and families where their parents have many contacts in the professional, political, industrial and commercial worlds. These young people, and indeed older students, do not have such contacts and need help in being placed and advised, not just at the end of their course but probably by following them up after they complete it. This is what a Director of Fair Access and Participation should be considering, and I believe it is what the Government have in mind.

I do not entirely accept what the noble Lord, Lord Willis has just said: namely, that you cannot mainstream these programmes or make them part of what universities do. They should all be central to whatever a university does. There should not be a single university in the country that does not think about how to make not just access but participation and progress central to what it does. Much as I admire many of our universities, I fear that this has not yet happened. It is not just about getting into Oxford or Cambridge; it is about general access to higher education right across the system.

It is also about ensuring that young people with great potential, but who have not been particularly well taught and have not had the advantages of homes where much can be provided in terms of extracurricular support, are able to access all universities, even those with very high research reputations. We do not want to corral all these young people into what happens to be their nearest university, which may be good at some things but not at some of the more academic pursuits that some of these students want to follow.

I feel that these things need to be made clear, but I support what my noble friend said in moving the amendment. I very much associate myself with what the noble Baroness, Lady Brinton, said. I thank the Government for the changes that they have made in their own amendment, which are an improvement. But we will want to come back at other stages of the Bill to some of the details about what the Director of Fair Access and Participation does and how his or her work can be reported, not just within the Office for Fair Access but more widely to Parliament and to Ministers.

--- Later in debate ---

[Baroness Blackstone (Lab)]

My Lords, the noble Lord, Lord Waldegrave, referred to what happened to him in 1981. I say to him that not everyone in the Labour Party or the so-called liberal intelligentsia failed to support him; I was strongly in favour of the move to charge overseas students fees. I think he was right and we have all benefited as a result.

I want to go back to another point in my career. When I was responsible for the Department for Education and Employment, we launched the Prime Minister’s initiative to recruit far more international students, and to do so in a way that would be more effective than when individual universities just went out one by one and competed with each other in trying to recruit these students. We worked out a system, we set targets for the numbers that we would try to recruit and we met those targets before the deadline for doing so. This was one of the really important contributions that Tony Blair made when he was Prime Minister. It derived from a visit to China when he met some former Chinese students who had studied in this country and was impressed by their commitment to the UK and their pleasure in describing what they had got out of being students here. He realised that if you do this well, you actually make friends for life. That is what we should aim to do when it comes to recruiting overseas students in large numbers.

I was going to make many of the points made by the noble Lord, Lord Smith, about the value to individual higher education institutions of bringing in a wide and diverse range of students from all over the world. It is of great benefit to British students. I disagree with him on one point, though: he referred to the “leading universities” doing this, by which I assume he means the research universities. No, it is not just about the leading universities; there are benefits to British students in all universities from getting to know students from around the world. In fact, the benefits are greater in those universities that do not have many advantaged students who have already been able to travel with or without their parents. When I was vice-chancellor of the University of Greenwich, we had a great many students from inner London and outer London who had never been abroad. In my view, for them to be able to meet students from around the world was an enormously enriching experience.

We must look at this not just in a slightly elitist way in respect to the “best and the brightest”, a phrase that I do not like very much. It is about all students, including those who come from the developing world who may not have had a fantastically strong secondary education—they too benefit from going to British universities. This is why so many of the growing middle class in India have wanted to send their students to this country. As someone who has spent quite a lot of time in India and who believes that it is a great country with which we should associate in as many ways as we can, I think it is a disaster that as a result of the visa policies of the Home Office over the past seven or eight years we have lost huge numbers of Indian students. We will live to regret that. I strongly support the amendments from the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, and hope that we can put in the Bill a requirement that the Office for Students should report on the number of international students coming here and what they are bringing in terms of financial benefit, let alone all the other invisible benefits that we have all talked about.

I have one final point. I agree with those Members of this House who have said it would be rather a good idea to welcome some of these students to stay here in employment. We will benefit from what they bring because they will be skilled and hard-working and will have knowledge that some of the other young professionals who are coming out of our universities do not have, because they come from every corner of the world.

[Lord Winston]

Is it not a factor that the Home Office does not have proper data on which students go to which universities from these other countries, which makes it very difficult to explain what we are doing and why it is so valuable to both them and us?

[Baroness Blackstone]

I cannot speak for the Home Office on the care it takes in collection of data. Others will know better, but I suspect that it is making very foolish adjustments every day of the week about the overseas students that we have in this country and their potential threat. They are not a threat: they are a benefit and advantage to us all.

[Lord Kakkar (CB)]

My Lords, I support the amendment in the name of my noble friend Lord Sutherland of Houndwood and remind noble Lords of my interests as professor of surgery at University College London, fellow of King’s College London and honorary fellow of Harris Manchester College, Oxford. My noble friend made an important point about the powerful effect that the annual report from the Office for Students may have in allaying concerns as these new structures settle down in the coming years. There is genuine anxiety and, as he said, transparency and accountability by way of this report could have a very important effect in ensuring that the ultimate arrangements agreed on as the Bill is passed and enacted are more broadly welcomed, and the opportunity for the new regulatory system to provide confidence to the entire sector is achieved.

The fact that there is little detail about the obligatory content of the annual report, apart from the financial information described so far in the Bill, means that we need to specify more accurately other elements that will provide that confidence. The elements in the amendment describing,

“all decisions relating to the registration, de-registration and re-registration of institutions”,

are vital. Such activities, very powerful in terms of regulation of the entire university and higher education sector, are in many respects new, and their exercise will have to be carefully monitored. This can be done only by accurate reporting. Equally, other areas of the amendment will provide confidence and help us to understand how the office is undertaking its work and ensure that Parliament is able to scrutinise this new and powerful body and return to its functions and responsibilities properly informed in future.

If Her Majesty’s Government are determined to make a success of this new regulatory regime, such a commitment to transparency and accountability will be vital. Such a commitment, reflected early in the passage of the Bill through your Lordships’ House, will allay other concerns about the nature and implications of the new regulatory regimen. I hope that the noble Viscount, in addressing the amendment, will be able to deal with the very important points that my noble friend raised.

Higher Education and Research Bill

Baroness Blackstone Excerpts

Monday 9th January 2017 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Wolf of Dulwich (CB)]

My Lords, I rise to speak to Amendments 55, 62, 72, 426 and 432, tabled in my name and those of the noble Baronesses, Lady Garden of Frognal and Lady Brown of Cambridge, and I will be very brief. I want to say how excellent is the amendment tabled by my noble friend Lord Kerslake because it encapsulates all our concerns about autonomy. I also agree with the eloquent speeches made by my noble friends Lord Kerslake and Lady Deech.

Importantly, these amendments deal with the whole of higher education, not just with universities. We will probably say this on a number of occasions in the weeks ahead, but we are in a new world in which higher and tertiary education is involving more and more of our citizens. Allowing institutions to decide which courses they teach and to be in control of how they deal with their academic staff and their students is absolutely critical to their ability to maintain standards and retain the autonomy that has served us very well.

[Baroness Blackstone (Lab)]

My Lords, I, too, strongly support the amendment in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Kerslake, which is extremely well worded and very appropriate for the legislation in front of us. I am absolutely convinced that the current Minister responsible for higher education will respect the institutional autonomy of universities, but some future Minister may not. As a former Minister responsible for higher and further education, I was rightly constrained by the 1988 Act and what Lord Jenkins managed to do with his amendment. There were sometimes times when I did not agree with what was happening, but I was unable to interfere, which would have been wholly inappropriate. That is an extremely good thing.

There is a second reason why I support the noble Lord’s amendment. I, along with Jo Ritzen, a very distinguished former Dutch Minister of Higher Education, and two other former European Education Ministers—Eduardo Grilo from Portugal and the former Hungarian Education Minister—embarked on a project led by Jo Ritzen entitled Empower European Universities. It looked at the position of universities across Europe—north, south, east and west—in particular at some of the problems some universities in eastern Europe experience, as in southern Europe. There was an incredible amount of state control over what these institutions could do. One of the outcomes of that is you get no innovation. Therefore, one of the reasons why we should promote autonomy in our higher education institutions is that we should be concerned to make sure universities do not stand still, that they take into account a changed environment and that they are innovative. By being autonomous they are far more likely to be innovative than if they are controlled by Governments, as we saw from the project we did across Europe.

[Lord Lucas (Con)]

My Lords, I join those who like Amendment 65, as my noble friend Lord Willetts predicted I would. I join him in saying that I do not share the fears expressed in Amendment 2. To take the example of BPP, which is the company that trained me as an accountant, it has been going a long time. It is the first among equals of a group of companies that have grown up providing professional training services to some very demanding customers. It has therefore developed an ethos of providing very good courses. It also sponsors women’s football, which I am grateful for. It has a broad and very encouraging ethos, which thoroughly justifies its status.

We have to be very careful about the quality of what is provided to students. Noble Lords will no doubt remember Ian Livingstone’s Next Gen report on training for the computer games industry. It found that 85% of courses provided by British universities were not up to scratch. We need to do a lot in the Bill and otherwise to provide students with better information about the quality of their courses, but the people who can demonstrate the best track record in this, who have the best sets of information and who have the most demanding customers are these commercial training companies and those who have come up by that route. We should not be frightened in any way by the fact that they are for profit. Despite that, they have proved that they can provide excellent education.

Higher Education and Research Bill

Baroness Blackstone Excerpts

Committee: 1st sitting (Hansard): House of Lords
Monday 9th January 2017 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Blackstone (Lab)]

My Lords, I want to speak very briefly at what I assume is getting towards the end of an interesting debate. What worries Members of this House most about the Bill are the clauses about new providers, and my noble friend Lady Warwick made this very clear in her excellent speech. We have a system of higher education in this country that is highly regarded all over the world. We have many great universities from the point of view of research but we also have many great universities from the point of view of the quality of their teaching and the advanced vocational training that they provide. We do not want this great system undermined by too easily recognising new institutions and giving them degree-awarding powers before they have been through a proper probationary period, in which they are associated with existing institutions that will support their development and growth and help them gain the capacity to become institutions of higher education that we can recognise, embrace and support. That is at the centre of the concerns that have led to a wish to place at the front of the Bill a set of propositions about what constitutes not just a good university but a good system of higher education.

The other point I want to make is that for many, many decades, higher education has embraced not only universities but many other kinds of institution. Some of what has been said when discussing the question of whether or not universities should cover a wide range of disciplines has not quite taken into account the fact that there are specialist institutions that have for a long time, as I have said, not been defined as universities. In some ways, I think we may have made a mistake in deciding that some of these specialist institutions should now be called universities. Looking back, we see that colleges of education, medical schools, music conservatoires, specialist arts colleges and, as the noble Lord, Lord Willetts, mentioned, the Royal Agricultural College, were not defined as universities but as being part of a system of higher education. We might be able to bring some new specialist institutions in, but they should not necessarily—at least not at the beginning of their existence—be called universities.

Most people understand that the concept of a university covers a range of disciplines, allows academics to mix with colleagues from a wide range of subjects and allows students to work not just with those studying exactly the same subjects as themselves but with students studying a wide range of subjects.

There is, in a sense, a bit of a contradiction in this legislation. One principle of all good legislation is that it should be internally consistent and its parts make up the whole in a way that is appropriate and easily understood. On the one hand, Part 3 of the Bill is asking for an umbrella body—UKRI, which would cover all areas of research—in order, we are told, to ensure that there is cross-disciplinary research rather than researchers being in separate little boxes not communicating with each other. That is what good universities do. They are institutions that look at a particular intellectual problem from a variety of different disciplinary perspectives and try to solve that problem. That is why some of the institutions that I mentioned earlier are to me higher education institutions, but they are not universities as normally understood.

To pick up what the noble Lord, Lord Sutherland, said a little earlier, what we should be doing now is not to try to define what a university is, because this Bill should not just be about universities. They are the main provider of higher education, but they may not be the sole providers. Rather we should start with something that sets out what the principles of good, strong, high-quality higher education should be. Of course, that should cover institutional autonomy, freedom of expression, academic freedom and a whole variety of other things that are mentioned in the amendment. But the way in which it has been framed at the moment leads to a certain concern that it is not definitionally perfect.

Will the Minister consider coming back to the House with a new amendment to start this Bill off that covers the sort of issues in the amendment tabled by my noble friend Lord Stevenson, and Cross-Bench and Liberal Democrat supporters? That would reassure us a little that the Government are concerned about these principles and will not rush into a set of legislative changes that will undermine the quality of our higher education system by bringing in new providers that will not meet these principles.

[Lord Brown of Eaton-under-Heywood (CB)]

I speak as a lawyer, not as an academic. Indeed, until recently I thought that I was the only Member of the House who has not ever been a governor, chancellor or vice-chancellor of one of these institutions. As my noble friend Lady Wolf has now twice explained, the only direct relevance of this proposed new clause goes to the title of the body in question. In short, it goes only to Clauses 51 to 55 of the Bill. I understand her concern to be with regard to bodies being allowed to be called universities. Effect would be given to that if one said at the start of this new proposed clause: “For the purposes of Clauses 51 to 55, a higher education institution”—because that is what the whole of the rest of the Bill is about, assiduously avoiding any distinction between universities and those such bodies that are not—“should be regarded as entitled to use the title of university if it is an autonomous institution”, to return to the language of Amendment 1, et cetera.

With the best will in the world, although it seems to be the opinion of many in the House that the amendment will affect the view generally as to the autonomous nature of these institutions, as drafted it will not. It goes only to the title. It does not go even to the degree-awarding powers. That has nothing to do with whether a body is or is not called a university. Therefore it is much more appropriate, when concerned not with the title but with the autonomy of these higher educational institutions, to look at the amendments to which others have referred, Amendments 65 and 165, which deal not only with universities but with all higher education institutions.

If we want to give universities some special status, which this Bill as drafted at the moment assiduously does not, we have to recast the thing as a whole and say, “If you are a university, not only will you be able to call yourself such but these consequences follow”.