Higher Education: Affordability and Quality

Baroness Freeman of Steventon Excerpts

Thursday 2nd July 2026 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Freeman of Steventon (CB)]

My Lords, I thank my noble friend Lady Deech for initiating the debate. I declare my interest as principal of Hertford College, Oxford.

I was incredibly lucky to have one-to-one and one-to-two tuition at university. My tutor said, “I have you for three years. I’m going to spend two of them teaching you how to think and then, at the end, I’m going to teach you how to pass the exams”. Over two years, I learned how to learn by myself, how to think critically and how to interrogate evidence and ideas—I was perhaps less good at learning how to pass the exams, which was not my tutor’s fault. I then went on to do a doctorate; like all doctorates, it was on a weirdly specialised topic that few outside the field would think important—perhaps even few inside the field. Again, I was lucky in my supervisor. He reminded me that a doctoral degree is education. It is about learning skills, not about making advances in the field. Every chapter was training me in a different skill.

As a doctoral student, you have to become even more independent as a learner and a thinker, and do more creative thinking within the bounds of your topic. As an individual student, the skills gained from this kind of education are very flexible. The specific facts and knowledge are not the point. I suspect that noble Lords who have done a degree, even one that is related to their professional career, rarely use much, if any, of the knowledge from the course. Instead, subjects are more a way of embedding the teaching of critical thinking and learning, and that gives you transferable skills and the confidence to work in a wide range of fields.

For the country, this is very important. Higher education that equips people to be confidently adaptive, to learn things quickly and independently, and to be creative is vital to a workforce, as are diversity and plurality of thought. People have different experiences and have learned different ways of thinking and approaches. Now, more than ever, we surely need critical thinking skills, intellectual flexibility and diversity, as technology increases the pace of change in work and the spread of ideas through society.

How do we encourage this kind of learning? The answer is dialogue: structured argumentation, personalised challenging conversations and detailed feedback. I was incredibly lucky to get that from a great tutor and then from my doctoral supervisor. The time investment and the skill needed for this kind of teaching is intense. It is important that academics who commit to it are given adequate recognition.

I am sure many people will be starting to wonder whether AI can be a good tutor, at least for undergraduates. It is personalised, challenging and can respond to challenge. In some cases, it probably could be good. But whether we can take advantage of its pros without losing other aspects of good tutoring through poorly thought-through use of it remains to be seen.

So much of what we learn during higher education is social. It cannot all be delivered digitally. Human mentorship, sports, music, drama, administration and normal social interactions with people from different backgrounds can be at least as important as the course tuition itself. We have to learn key skills, such as resilience, appropriate risk-taking, confidence and humility. These are priceless. But of course, they are not; they have a price. As a country, we have to think quickly and hard about how we can have a higher education system that is affordable, gives students the chance to develop these skills and works in the world of AI.

Others have spoken, and will speak, with more experience about financial issues. I will just say that, as the number of young people in the UK falls following changes in demographics and immigration, there is the opportunity to increase the ratio of tutors to students more affordably if funding is not allocated on a per-student basis. What plans do the Government have for higher education funding as student numbers fall?

In the immediate term, we also need to address the costs for students. Looking at our undergraduate students at Hertford, we see a squeezed middle of students who come from households within the household income bracket where the government assistance tapers. As the cost of living has risen, those in that taper band have less assistance from the Government, but their families are also unable to give financial support. I would like to ask the Minister whether they are increasing the income bands used to assess student support as the cost of living increases.

Finally, I have a plea for those students who want to continue their studies, particularly to do a higher research degree such as a doctorate. These students, however promising, are really struggling to find the means to study, particularly outside the disciplines of science and medicine. Higher research degrees are not professional training for those who want to stay as academic researchers. They are for people who want to learn to research topics to the greatest depth and teach themselves new techniques and to be creative thinkers.

Half of our home students studying higher degrees at Hertford are now self-funding. We cannot afford for our future thinkers to have low diversity, either through narrow domains of study, restricting the number of people who have learned to approach problems in certain ways, or through narrow demographics: having only those who come from backgrounds where they can afford to fund themselves. I ask the Government to think about how they can best ensure that students from all backgrounds have the opportunity to be taught how to think and how to learn for themselves within the framework of a broad range of subjects, because that is what this fast-changing world demands.