Higher Education and Research Bill

Baroness Cohen of Pimlico Excerpts

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

[Lord Cormack]

Of course it will pervade our discussions throughout the Bill, in Committee and on Report, and it may well be necessary to move a refined amendment on Report and to vote on it—of course it may. But do not let us tie a Minister of State’s hands when he has shown himself anxious and eager to listen to what your Lordships say. We are having a good debate, and have had some notable speeches. Let us not push this to a vote this afternoon.

[Baroness Cohen of Pimlico (Lab)]

My Lords, I am grateful for the noble Lord’s comments, because I have the greatest possible difficulty with this amendment, for a reason that nobody in the Committee has stated this afternoon. The amendment, as drafted, risks disqualifying—and hence turning some into sheep and some into goats—a whole group of bodies that have been given degree-awarding powers and the title of university since the legislation enabling that in 2004. I should declare an interest in that I am chancellor of BPP University, which is one of the biggest of the new, private universities. We were given degree-awarding powers in 2007 and, much to our great pleasure, were awarded the title of university in 2013.

What do I find when I read the proposed new clause? We would be supposed to provide a full range of subjects—but we do not and never did, although we have a full range of business subjects. Many of my colleagues in the 60 or 70 institutions that have gained degree-awarding powers are in the same place. This clause would just put us somewhere else. It gets rather worse as it goes on, with the second proposed new clause, at which point “UK universities” become separated from other, for-profit universities. We would somehow have ceased to be UK universities, but surely we are constituted under the 2004 legislation—so what would happen? Would we all be universities, with the title, or would we in some way not be, as UK universities become the sheep and the rest of us become the goats?

I have a real problem with this proposed new clause. The legislation was perfectly all right as originally drafted, when we were all higher education providers, but this clause would, for I think many of us, throw a real spanner into the works right at the beginning of the Bill. I would have to oppose the amendment were we to take a vote.

[Lord Broers (CB)]

My Lords, I speak as a past vice-chancellor of Cambridge, but more importantly, I have associations with universities all around the world and other universities here in the UK. I support the proposed new clause but also support the need to give it further consideration. I will make just one point: it does not mention governance, and whether universities not only are autonomous but have the right to determine how they govern themselves. This has been a matter of some consideration over the years in various universities, and we debated it intensely in Cambridge at one time. Universities should be allowed to determine their own form of governance, and some words need to be included in a clause like this to say that. It would be a good idea not to go ahead immediately with the proposed new clause but to discuss it much further, particularly taking into account the independence of universities in determining how they govern themselves.

Higher Education and Research Bill

Baroness Cohen of Pimlico Excerpts

Monday 9th January 2017 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Cohen of Pimlico (Lab)]

Perhaps I may add to my earlier remarks. This proposed new clause is absolute anathema to those of us who are chancellors of substantial private universities set up under the 2004 legislation and regulated to the hilt. My organisation, BPP, has 20,000 students, we have 5,000 to 6,000 undergraduates and we make a profit. We charge £5,000 a year, which is very much less than £9,000 a year, for a three-year degree, and £6,000 a year for a two-year degree. We have part-time degrees all over the place and we offer degree-awarding apprenticeships. We are fairly specialised. We stick within the general field of law and business, although we have just branched out into nursing and medicine—so tomorrow the world.

However, none of that is envisaged in the clause produced by my noble friend Lord Stevenson. I cannot believe that this House intends to outlaw this kind of university. Indeed, you can hardly do so because BPP was granted university status in 2013 after four heavy-duty years of regulation—and we are still heavily regulated, which we do not mind at all.

We would all be perfectly happy with the autonomy clause. For BPP, autonomy is guaranteed by a very tough academic council. You try telling the academic council what to do. That is just impossible—and occasionally it frustrates things that the management would like to do.

Therefore, we really do have to rethink this and, as my noble friend said, bottom out what we mean by “for-profit universities”. I cannot believe that BPP is the only organisation that would be affected by this proposal, yet it is the only one of any size that I can describe. Further on in the debate I will want to emphasise that we went through four years of heavy-duty regulation to get there. To be honest, that is about what it took to convert us from a first-class, long-established training establishment to something that had proper academic qualifications and worked as a university. Therefore, I suggest that we look very carefully at probationary degree-awarding powers. I feel equally strongly about the idea of outlawing private sector universities. There would be one set of things called UK universities, which would be the gold standard, and then there would be the rest of us. What would that say about the 2004 legislation—or indeed about the future of universities in this country? We will have to think about this rather carefully.

[Baroness Garden of Frognal (LD)]

My Lords, I added my name to this amendment on the basis that it seemed to contain some things that were very worthy of discussion. As we have heard, this is obviously a rather controversial area, but it gives us another chance to look closely at what we understand by universities and at what characteristics in them we value.

There is much to support the ongoing role of the Privy Council in the establishment of universities, providing as it does impartiality, expertise and universal standing in the awarding of royal charters. This clause would also allow for Acts of Parliament—but, again, it is open to debate as to whether there should be other sources of authority. There is a general anxiety that there should be authoritative powers to set up new universities because there is a concern that the Bill as it stands seems to give a fairly free hand for new universities to be set up without necessarily the standards that we have all grown accustomed to.

The other amendments in this group to which I have added my name are all to do with autonomy, which we discussed at great length in the debate on Amendment 1. The success of universities depends on their ability to take their own decisions, so that they can be flexible and responsible to the environment in which they are working and decide for themselves on courses, staffing and admissions. The Bill as drafted includes a number of areas where a future regime could seek to intervene in matters that are for individual institutions. Autonomy has been recognised as providing a key competitive advantage and, indeed, has been identified as a critical factor in making the UK the top performer in the efficiency and effectiveness of public spending in tertiary education. These amendments would enshrine university autonomy in the Bill.

We welcome the Government’s amendment that states:

“Guidance framed by reference to a particular course of study must not guide the OfS to perform a function in a way which prohibits or requires the provision of a particular course of study”.

This addresses concerns about the Government directing individual institutions on which courses they can open or close. However, autonomy is such a fundamental principle of the UK higher education system that we would want the Bill to go further. The amendments in this group enshrine that.

--- Later in debate ---

[Baroness Brinton (LD)]

My Lords, the autonomy outlined in both this and the previous debate has been one of the guiding stars of our universities in this country for hundreds of years. The balance in their relationship with either the Government of the day or other local interests has been vital. That is why I support the amendment in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Kerslake.

The noble and learned Lord, Lord Mackay, spoke about profit and not-for-profit and why whether a university or institution might be a charity was irrelevant. I spent more than a decade as a Cambridge college bursar and I know many other finance directors of universities. Getting into a debate about charity and about trading arms ends up being a debate about VAT. That is not the business of this House today, but I could bore your Lordships in some detail on that. It is available to most large charities to find mechanisms that allow them to trade, but the big difference is that they then reinvest profits from any trading arm into the charity. That is why I prefer the word “surplus” to “profit”. That has been the guiding star of our university sector for some time.

I was rather taken with the idea put forward by the noble Baroness, Lady Cohen, of a probationary period. I hope your Lordships will forgive me for coming back to my own experience, but 20 years ago this year, Lucy Cavendish College achieved full college status with its own statutes—which went through the Privy Council—and part of my role in the preceding five years was to ready the college for that and to prove that the college would be here in a hundred years’ time. That included demonstrating the standards that everybody has talked about—making sure that the base finances were solid enough and that access to students and provision of courses met the demands of Cambridge University. The problem for Lucy Cavendish was that it was a 30-year probationary period, but we are talking about the University of Cambridge and perhaps time moves slightly more slowly there than for others. However, the key lesson that the college learned as we prepared for getting our own autonomy was that we had to be able to demonstrate a whole range of standards that would ensure that provision, and then we could accept the responsibilities that come with the autonomy that the noble and learned Lord, Lord Mackay, outlined.

I think that the reason that this debate and the debate on the previous amendment have gone on so long is that there is a great fear that in the Bill as outlined, such autonomy is undermined. That is the debate that we need during the passage of this Bill in order to negotiate our way through difficult words such as public and private. I have a slight concern—I would never have described myself at university as being part of the public, but I accept that there was a duty towards the public. It is that language that we need to look at.

[Baroness Cohen of Pimlico]

My Lords, I would not have spoken again but for the fact that I should have known the noble Baroness, Lady Brinton, had been so heavily involved with Lucy Cavendish, of which I am an honorary fellow and, I hope, partly responsible for its financial stability. One thing is being missed out of this debate on autonomy—it is my fault because I have not mentioned it: we find ourselves heavily constrained by the role of the academic council. We also find the role of our owners and financiers considerably stood off by the role of the academic council. The academic council is a great defence against anybody trying to tell us to do things—not that our owners do that. It stands firm. I am sure that this must be true for other universities. It is an important part of autonomy. We do not seem to have discussed academic councils. Perhaps they will be mentioned later in the Bill.

Higher Education and Research Bill

Baroness Cohen of Pimlico Excerpts

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

[Lord Winston (Lab)]

My Lords, I strongly support what the noble Baroness, Lady Bakewell, said about part-time students. We will come back to that subject in more detail during these debates. Of all days, today we should think about that really seriously. London has been brought to a standstill by a transport strike, and it is only a matter of time before the drivers of those trains, not merely the people and guards and the other people on the platforms, will no longer be working, because science and technology is advancing rapidly. That is a model for our society, and people will have to retrain.

In my 15 years’ involvement with Sheffield Hallam University, one thing that I have learned above all is that people taking part-time courses have transformed their lives in gaining skills, coming from relatively manual jobs, or jobs with a low level of skill. It is vital that we find every possibility of supporting those students. I urge the Government to consider that during the passage of this Bill. I also briefly defer to the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, and congratulate him on his interest in school students, which has been long-standing and of great importance.

From my experience, I cannot emphasise enough the lack of aspiration that so many school students have because they do not really believe that they can go to university. That is why it is so important that we have the bridge between school and university which this minor amendment would help to promote. There are all sorts of reasons why that is important. We may have the best school teachers in the world, but so many children go home to a desert where there is no aspiration. Their parents ask them: “Why aren’t you going out to work; why aren’t you earning money; why aren’t you supporting the household?”. It is extremely important to find ways of encouraging people from those sorts of backgrounds to understand that they should be considering further or higher education. Having people on this new body who can help universities interface with schools and teachers to give better career guidance would be a blessing and it should be incorporated in the Bill.

[Baroness Cohen of Pimlico (Lab)]

My Lords, it is with great relief that I rise this time to support the amendments proposed by own side; I have confidence in all of them. I also emphasise the importance of part-time students. They are a key part of the business of BPP University—and, like other universities, we suffered a great fall in numbers without changing our offering. We have changed our offering in every way we know how but we are still not increasing the numbers and it will take some work to find out why. In passing, I observe that I have great respect for the work of Select Committees, but I am really not sure that submitting the prospective chairman of whatever this body is going to be called to one is depoliticising the appointment. Select Committees are a fairly political way of doing anything and I do not have much confidence in that suggestion.

[Baroness Brown of Cambridge (CB)]

My Lords, I speak in support of the amendments which relate to the representation of people with experience of non-standard and non-typical students, including part-time and mature students. In particular, I support Amendment 10 in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Stevenson. One very good thing about the Bill and about my discussions with the Minister of State has been the very strong commitment to improving widening participation in higher education. We all know what a fantastic driver of social mobility higher education qualifications are, leading to higher employability, higher earning capacity, better citizenship and even things such as better health in future life. For all these reasons, having a non-executive member on the Office for Students board—in addition, of course, to the Director of Fair Access—who has strong experience of improving equality of opportunity, social mobility and widening participation is, as the noble Lord, Lord Winston, said, crucial.

Higher Education and Research Bill

Baroness Cohen of Pimlico Excerpts

2nd reading (Hansard): House of Lords
Tuesday 6th December 2016 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Cohen of Pimlico (Lab)]

My Lords, I should remind the House that I am chancellor of and senior adviser to BPP University and was an honorary fellow of two Cambridge colleges for mature students—St Edmund’s and the Lucy Cavendish.

I intend to speak exclusively about the provisions of the Bill that seek to extend degree-awarding powers more widely and to regulate institutions of higher education differently. I think I am the first—and I may be the only—speaker in this debate with experience of what it is like to be in one of the institutions authorised under the last Higher Education Act. I should perhaps remind the House, in view of the comments from my own side, that that was introduced and passed by a Labour Government.

The BPP group goes back a long way. It was created in 1976 by three accountants and specialised in the teaching of accountancy for the professional examinations. We added the teaching of law in the late 1990s and secured degree-awarding powers in 2007. We are widely recognised in the professions and the City. Some 40% of all new entrants into the English legal profession are educated by BPP, more than 120,000 students study with the university and the wider group every year, and two-thirds of all accountants qualifying today either study with us or use our study materials. There are many BPP alumni in both Houses of Parliament, including the noble Lord, Lord Holmes of Richmond. Our management goes back a long way, too. Today is, by chance, the 20th anniversary of our vice-chancellor, Professor Carl Lygo, joining the group and making our law school so successful. I have been a peripheral part of the group for 23 years, since I joined as a non-executive director.

The university offers, in our law school, graduate and undergraduate degrees on a full or part-time basis in all aspects of business law. On the same basis, including on a part-time basis, our business school offers degrees in accountancy, finance and marketing. We have seven centres, five of them outside London. We continue to expand and now offer degrees in nursing, working with two NHS trusts. In what we regard as a very important development, we have 2,000 degree-level apprentices studying with BPP at the moment, known to us as the “zero-debt” degree option. We expect to teach many more as the projected apprenticeship levy comes into force.

We charge lower fees than most: £5,000 annually for our three-year undergraduate degrees and £6,000 a year for the intensive two-year undergraduate degrees. We have very high retention and progression rates, and our graduates get good jobs. Our staff are employed on proper terms and proper contracts, and are well paid. Most are very long-serving. I cannot begin to imagine what any of them would say to a zero-hours contract were we idiotic enough to offer it.

It took us four long and expensive years, from 2003 to 2007, to get degree-awarding powers. We were an early applicant and the only for-profit private sector group seeking those powers, so the QAA approached us with great caution. However, I welcome—with only slightly gritted teeth—the Bill’s provisions to streamline regulatory requirements for getting degree-awarding powers and to award these powers to institutions that wish to offer degrees in a limited range of subjects. With what relief we would have accepted either of those as a method of shortening the long process of getting degree-awarding powers. We never intended to teach outside our core subjects of law and business. I can see no reason why other institutions which intend an equally limited offering should not have an easier run to degree-awarding powers for subjects in which they have real expertise and teaching experience.

I also welcome the Bill’s proposals to subject all higher education institutions with degree-awarding powers to the same regulatory regime, ending the anomalous position whereby new but highly successful institutions such as BPP University are rigorously regulated and inspected and older universities with terrible retention rates, which turn out graduates who have difficulty getting into the workforce at a level that rewards their investment, are not so inspected.

The proposals for more targeted regulation are also welcome. They may be formulaic but the limited number of key performance indicators will tell a regulator very quickly if things are not going right. These include: a falling off in the retention rate, progression rate or employability numbers; a sharp fall in staff numbers and their qualifications; or a fall in student numbers. These are straightforward statistics that can be looked at off-site and should obviate the need for routine visits and enable regulatory attention to be concentrated on the trouble spots shown up. So I support these provisions and think they are completely unexceptionable.

Students are at the heart of the Bill and as both chancellor of BPP and a Member of your Lordships’ House concerned with public policy, I welcome the renewed emphasis on the needs of students, as evidenced by the setting up of the Office for Students and the new clause added in Committee in the other place which provides for student representation in the Office for Students. The present system depends heavily on students behaving like well-informed customers able to decide for themselves what they want. Like the noble Baroness, Lady Eccles, I do not believe in calling students “customers”. They really are not: they are students. Too often they have had to choose an institution on the basis of the social life, the accommodation or where their friends are going. All these are important but surely not on a par with the basic information of whether or not they are likely to emerge with a degree, let alone a job.

So far, so good for the proposals in the Bill. My experience, however, makes me very uncomfortable with the idea of granting degree-awarding powers to institutions with no track record in the field for which they seek these powers and which are essentially start-ups. I took a little time to outline BPP’s history because our years of experience and the quality of our staff are what have led to our success, not just sensible regulation. The technical notes to the Bill make it clear that the staff proposed and the financial stability of the new entity will be very carefully scrutinised, and I welcome the thought. But the Department for Education has less than happy experience of bringing in a star head teacher to turn round a failing school only to find that after an initial improvement the school has been left in no better state. The most successful institutions in education or commerce have well-defined cultures with clear agreed values, which have taken time to develop and are not easily achieved with brand new teams that have not worked together before.

I will stop after saying that there are even greater problems with granting degree-awarding powers or provisional degree-awarding powers to institutions or teams with no experience in the UK, and this provision should be treated with great caution. It seems likely that it will be foreign-based institutions with low retention rates, often dependent on online teaching, rather than Harvard or the École des Mines, which will be applying under this provision. There are huge real difficulties with judging the quality of online-based institutions, whether based in the UK or elsewhere. Great caution must be exercised.

This is my last page. In conclusion, as a lawyer and given the huge new responsibilities being devolved to the Office for Students, I would like to see more of its duties and responsibilities appear in the Bill. We are all familiar with the wish of government to future-proof legislation by providing codes of practice that can be changed, but this argument should not be applied to the targeted regulation of higher education. The key educational indicators are universal and unchanging and I wish to see more of these specified so that we can all be clear from the Bill itself what is expected of higher education institutions and their regulation.

Education: Contribution to Economic Growth

Baroness Cohen of Pimlico Excerpts

Thursday 5th December 2013 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Cohen of Pimlico (Lab)]

My Lords, many noble Lords have spoken about education in schools, which clearly, with a long tail of almost 1 million NEETs, is absolutely vital to our children and grandchildren. However, like my noble friend Lady Warwick of Undercliffe, I want to talk about the importance of education at university level, but from rather a different angle. I declare an interest as chancellor of BPP University. BPP are the initials of the founder of a fine training company, but now stand for the Business and Professional University. My noble friend Lady Morgan of Huyton emphasised in her speech the importance of technical education for economic growth. We at BPP, and I as the chairman of BPP Holdings Ltd long before we acquired degree-awarding powers—which we did in 2007, acquiring full university status this year—always thought that the end purpose of education must be to enable people to find a job and the life that will please them and give them a decent standard of living. Coming from a training background, as we do, we have always believed that. Yes, of course there are cultural purposes to university education, but for us the outstanding purpose has always been to enable our graduates to get into good, well paid jobs, because all else can stem from there.

I need to talk about the university a little in order to make my point. We have 9,000 students on seven campuses around the UK, with two in London and five in the regions. Some 3,000 of the students are undergraduates, which is a new departure for us. We teach very successfully the core business subjects, mostly accountancy and law. Some 65% of our students are female, and 96% have a job or are in further training within six months of leaving us. Our graduates make a major contribution to economic growth both directly and indirectly. They do so directly because we have a great many students at the graduate level from overseas, which helps to level up the balance of payments as well as spreading the reputation of the UK overseas. The indirect but vital contribution to growth is that the reputation of the UK as a good place to do business depends on having a corps of well trained, professional lawyers, accountants, actuaries and other business specialists. The City of London could not be the force that it is, contributing 20% of GDP, without its highly skilled lawyers and specialist accountants. Businesses all over the UK depend for their stability, and thus their ability to grow, on the efforts of their finance directors and the support of properly trained commercial lawyers.

At BPP I think that we can be rightly proud of our contribution not least because, as I should make clear, we are the only private, for-profit university in the country. But we are not the only people in the business. We believe that we are the most successful at placing our graduates in employment. A lot of universities teach law on a more theoretical basis, but we believe that students need to be taught by people who have worked in the profession. Some 80% of our tutors come from that background. The UK could do with more courses like this. I personally am particularly interested in the undergraduate-level courses that enable people of any age to move quickly into a position where they are useful and employable. There are definitely not enough of such courses, particularly for the capable young person who does not quite know what they want to do, but knows they want a decent job in a good business.

We have only 3,000 undergraduates so far but, private and profit-making business or not, we are able to charge fees of £5,500 a year for the three-year course, which is substantially less than for most law and business courses. The reason we can keep the fees down is that we do not have a conventional university structure. We sweat our assets and our buildings are hardly ever empty. Also, we have extremely flexible staff. We attract the services of excellent people by offering them what is essentially very well paid shift work on a part-time basis. That is a far cry from the leisurely programmes that I enjoyed as an undergraduate but it is very effective, and I believe that our universities could do much more to make their students more employable by teaching them for longer and better without risking the loss of the enjoyable university experience.

A new departure for us is that we believe that it is possible to deliver degrees that will get our students into good jobs on the basis of two years’ study. This is a work in progress but last week I was able to award degrees to some of the first graduates under the scheme. Those students are paying fees of £6,000 a year because the course is that bit more difficult to teach. On the other hand, however, they are getting a very economical degree because they pay only two years’ living fees, and it looks as though it will be very popular. Since most of our undergraduates are in their 20s, rather than 18 years old, this is of great importance, although it will also be an attractive offer to those aged 18. It will suit those people who did not quite work out what they wanted to do when they were 18, which must be a lot of them.

I believe that our model of using tutors who have worked in the relevant industry, determined and almost full-time university education, along with the very careful mentoring of students and a concentration on using assets so that higher education can be cheaper, could be spread more widely to other institutions. I regret very much something that has not yet been mentioned in the debate, which is the passing of the polytechnics, or rather their translation into universities. The polytechnics used to provide excellent technical training, which became diluted and a bit overly academic as they turned into universities. We are more on the model of a polytechnic than much of what is now being offered. I believe, I am afraid, that turning polytechnics into universities was a retrograde step for the country.

BPP University is a product of cross-party agreement. We were authorised under the Labour Government, who wanted to expand the provision of higher education and make it more varied and interesting, and we have been authenticated and given full degree-awarding powers following our review in 2013—so I am glad to record that this is not a controversial party political matter. We believe that it is a model for the future, and I would like to see more of it. I always say that I was badly taught at Cambridge, and that it was not until I met BPP and its training model that I realised what really good teaching looked like.