Higher Education and Research Bill

Debate between Baroness Brown of Cambridge and Lord Smith of Finsbury

Committee: 3rd sitting (Hansard): House of Lords
Monday 16th January 2017 Lords Chamber

[Lord Smith of Finsbury]

My Lords, I will reflect very briefly on what actually happened in Cambridge on 23 June last year. That fell at just the end of term. A lot of students were graduating and a lot of them were still in Cambridge. As the head of a college, I had spent rather a lot of time over the preceding two or three months encouraging students to register and explaining to them how they could register individually. For many of them, the decision made on 23 June was about their future. They were very strongly engaged with the issues. But quite a number of them ended up unable to cast a vote on 23 June because they had not got round to registering.

Yes, of course, it was their fault in not registering. They should have done so. None the less, we as a society ought to make it as easy as possible to ensure that every young person is registered and has the ability to vote. The amendment would solve the problem. I support it.

[Baroness Brown of Cambridge]

My Lords, I support the intent of this amendment. When I was vice-chancellor at Aston University, we were not able to implement a system which allowed our students to opt in, but it was very simple to provide on the online registration page a reminder to students that they should register to vote and a link to the site where they could do so. Even if it were not possible to go all the way, as this amendment envisages, it would not create difficulty to require higher education providers to encourage students to do so, and to give students the ability to find the link from the university’s online registration site or through their virtual learning environment.

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[Lord Smith of Finsbury]

My Lords, I will forgo the opportunity to discourse the difference between “shall” and “must”; I would simply observe that both tend to be better than “may”. However, I commend the amendment. The mental well-being of students in our universities is hugely important, and is becoming even more so because of the increasing stresses on students in our universities. That is partly due to the increasingly competitive post-university market in getting careers and jobs; the determination to do well in order to perform well after university is now a very great pressure on our students.

However, I have to say that that impact is exacerbated by the increasing development of social media. Anything that is said or observed about a fellow student now becomes magnified a hundred times through the use of social media. The stress that can follow from that on individual students can be intense. It is incumbent on universities—“shall” or “must”—to provide not just detailed day-to-day pastoral care through a tutorial system for students but, if necessary, to have expert, trained counsellors available if things start to go seriously wrong. To those who would say, “This will cost money”, yes it will cost some money but it would cost far more if we did not do it and then things went seriously wrong for a number of our students. I urge the Government to give every sympathetic consideration they can to the points that have been made in this debate and to the amendment.

[Baroness Brown of Cambridge]

My Lords, I want to further emphasise the importance of mental health support to the areas of access and progression. We appropriately attract more students who do not come from a family background where higher education is the norm, who do not have the support from home to ensure that they understand the experiences they are having and the ups and downs of their university careers. As we stress in the Bill, we want to see those students progress and succeed in their degrees. For this to be successful it is critical that universities provide mental health support to their students.