Higher Education and Research Bill

Baroness Deech Excerpts

Committee: 4th sitting (Hansard): House of Lords
Wednesday 18th January 2017 Lords Chamber

[Lord Norton of Louth (Con)]

My Lords, I have two amendments in this grouping, and I declare my interest as a serving academic. I share the views of the noble Lord, Lord Desai, who I gather is a fellow graduate of the University of Pennsylvania, on the NSS, and to some extent those of my noble friend Lord Willetts. The survey provides valuable feedback and is a useful form of intelligence, but I am not sure that it can bear the weight that it has been given in this proposal for the TEF.

I commend the Government for recognising the importance of teaching and their acknowledgement of the complementarity of teaching and research. I commend them also for seeking to enhance teaching excellence. Ensuring that more information, and comparable information, is made available to prospective students, and encouraging the dissemination of best practice within HE, are wholly commendable goals. My amendments would protect the provision of information. I have no problem with introducing incentives to HE institutions to enhance teaching quality, but where we need to stress test this part of the Bill is in creating a statutory link between teaching quality and the level of fees being charged for that teaching.

There are three problems with the link stipulated in the Bill. The first is defining what is meant by teaching excellence. The proposed metrics for the TEF are too blunt to meet the assessment criteria and, in some respects, too narrow. The Explanatory Notes to the Bill state:

“The Teaching Excellence Framework is intended to provide clear, understandable information to students about where teaching quality is outstanding and to establish a robust”—


I always worry the moment I see the word “robust”—

“framework for gathering information to measure teaching in its broadest sense”.

I have no problem with the first part of the statement. It is the second part that is problematic. What is meant by teaching “in its broadest sense”? For me, it encompasses the capacity to develop not only intellectual but also personal skills that will enable students to fulfil their full potential as individuals in wider society. This may not be confined to career goals but may extend to being worthwhile members of society—in effect, good citizens. How does one measure that added value? It goes beyond the assessment criteria. I have serious concern with some of the metrics, because I fear that they may privilege status rather than teaching excellence.

The second concern is that, in so far as one can assess teaching excellence, quality is at department or course level, as the noble Lord, Lord Kerslake, and others have stressed. One has only to look at the National Student Survey to see variations between the aggregate at institutional level and the performance at subject and course levels. Yet the intention is to enable an institution to charge a higher fee level, which may apply to all courses, even those which deliver less quality than courses at other institutions which are not able to increase their fees.

The third concern, as we have heard already from the noble Lord, Lord Watson, is that there is no clear link between fees and teaching excellence. Higher fees will not necessarily serve to drive up teaching quality, but rather enable HE providers to spend more on marketing and ensuring brand recognition. More money may be spent on providing services to students, but not necessarily on their teaching.

In short, the proposal before us is based on a concept that is not clearly defined, cannot fairly be applied at institutional level and asserts a link that has not been proven. I look forward to my noble friend the Minister assuaging my concerns.

[Baroness Deech (CB)]

I declare an interest as former principal of St Anne’s, Oxford, and former independent adjudicator of higher education. I am speaking in support of Amendment 122. I have three very brief points to make.

First, it has been alleged that the whole purpose of the Bill is to enable universities to raise fees, and that all the contortions that we are going through in relation to the Bill is centred on this one element—that one will be able to raise fees if the teaching is good. That seems to me not a healthy way to approach it.

Secondly, there is profound disagreement about what is good teaching. One metric is likely to be the prevention of drop-outs and helping students from non-traditional or underprivileged backgrounds to get through the course without failing. This must tempt tutors and lecturers to spoon-feed and it is simply not clear in higher education whether the temptation for spoon-feeding—a brief term but I think all noble Lords understand what I mean—will be enhanced by some of the metrics, as I understand them.

My third point is related to the question of teaching students from less-privileged backgrounds. What will this link do to social mobility? The better universities, however they are judged, are quite likely to be Oxbridge and the Russell group, are they not? They will be able to charge higher fees. Some other universities, which will be taking more of those from underprivileged and less-traditional backgrounds, and may be doing more spoon-feeding, may well find that their teaching is not rated so highly, for reasons that all of us who have ever taught such students very well understand. They will charge lower fees. It will become a reinforcing division: the so-called “best” universities charging the higher fees will attract those students who can afford them and the not so good under this scale—the bronze—will likely get the not-so-good students who cannot afford the fees. This will really damage social mobility and parity of esteem, not to mention the fact that this is coupled with the abolition of maintenance grants, meaning that more students will be forced to go to their local university. So my question to the Minister is: what effect do the Government think the linking of fees to teaching quality will have on social mobility?

[Baroness Warwick of Undercliffe (Lab)]

My Lords, I declare an interest as a member of the council of two universities. Like others, I am in something of a quandary on this part of the Bill; I have several concerns about the TEF, but I support enthusiastically any attempt to improve the status and excellence of teaching in universities. As chief executive of Universities UK, way back in the 1990s, I was instrumental in helping to develop the Quality Assurance Agency, which has gone on to do such a great job of encouraging institutions to take teaching much more seriously. It has developed the extensive framework for assurance and quality enhancement that characterises the HE sector today and which is admired around the world.

Despite the fact that there is an enormous amount of good teaching in universities, producing excellent learning outcomes, it has long been a dilemma that—at least in certain institutions—research and not teaching has become the means of individual advancement and the basis for institutional reputation, reinforced by league tables. That is not to say that researchers do not make good teachers—many do—but it is research that garners the accolades. Not enough weight is given to the support of students through good teaching, although I am heartened to learn that there has been much more emphasis recently on showing students how research and scholarship links with undergraduate learning.

The HE system is changing rapidly. It is already a diverse system and is becoming ever more diverse as new providers enter the sector. I was astonished to learn in a recent report that, on one count, there are 700 alternative providers; I gather that the more reliable figure is 400, but that is still more than double the number of established universities and clearly offers students a great deal more choice than was available, say, five or 10 years ago. Inevitably, though, there is a greater risk of poor-quality provision if these providers are not subject to the same extensive quality assurance process or regulatory regime as existing providers. So it is wise, in this new and changing environment, to review the way in which the quality assurance system deals with this much more complex world. Talking to people in the sector, and from what I read, I believe that the teaching excellence framework—the TEF—has the potential to provide more encouragement and support for teaching, to produce useful information for students, and, hopefully, to raise the status of teaching in all HE providers. But some of its provisions worry me—those worries have been reflected by other noble Lords.

We have been given a very useful briefing from the department on this part of the Bill and I thank the civil servants, some of whom I recognise in the Box, for the careful, helpful and comprehensive way that they have guided us through this Bill before each of our sessions. However, the recent briefing highlighted some of my concerns. The range of metrics described in the briefing, while voluminous, do not seem related to good teaching. They seemed much broader than a framework for teaching excellence would suggest. The metrics on employability and equality of opportunity—while perfectly good—suggest, for example, that the TEF is really about the student experience, or indeed about any provision that is not evaluated by the research excellence framework—the REF.