Higher Education

Baroness Perry of Southwark Excerpts

Wednesday 9th April 2014 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Perry of Southwark (Con)]

My Lords, I, too, thank my noble friend for having initiated this amazing debate. Already we have had so many extraordinary and memorable speeches. So many of the major issues have already been dealt with in such a learned and detailed way, but I shall not do that. I thought that it would perhaps be my role to talk about one particular university and to bring some practical examples of what one university can do.

My experience spans both being vice-chancellor of London South Bank University, an access university, and being head of a house, head of a college in Cambridge University. I celebrate and rejoice in the diversity that those two institutions represent and I very much agree with the noble Baroness, Lady Morris, about league tables. If you start a league table only with those universities which accept students with three or four As at A-level, you inevitably put all the access universities down at the bottom. That is unjust and ridiculous. If we are to have league tables, let them at least celebrate the diversity which is an essential ingredient of good higher education.

I could have chosen to talk about London South Bank University, which I love dearly, but I have decided instead to use the time available to talk about the other university that I know and love—the University of Cambridge. I was lucky enough to be an undergraduate at Girton for three wonderful years many years ago. Incidentally, my three years there cost neither me nor my parents a penny. I was fortunate in having a full maintenance grant as well as my fees being paid. I still remember the first cheque that I wrote in my brand new cheque book was to repay my father for the 12/6d of my train fare to get there. Otherwise I was absolutely on my own. I was lucky, as I said, also to be head of one of the colleges of the university, to which I will refer later, for seven very happy years.

Cambridge, of course, is not alone in its success—many other universities have equally strong success stories to tell—but it is the one I know and I use it as an illustration of what a good university can do to contribute to society and change the world for the better, as Cambridge University’s mission describes it.

Almost 20 years ago, the noble Lord, Lord Broers, declared in his inaugural address as vice-chancellor that Cambridge was “open for business”. In that speech he invited companies to come to share in partnership the physical facilities and human intellectual capital which the university could offer. What followed was a huge influx of business into the city and its area—not least, of course, the large Microsoft research campus, the only one that that great company located outside the US. Over the years since, the university has played a central role in creating one of the wealthiest regions in the country, competing with the legendary areas which have grown around the successful universities in the United States.

Today, in addition to the links between Cambridge and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the university has its first research centre outside the UK, in Singapore, dealing with advanced research in energy efficiency. Back in Cambridge, more than 250 academics are working also on energy-related topics, solving some of the complex problems of the issue of energy which face our world today. Those 250 academics are drawn from 27 different departments, faculties and centres in the university. They focus on the issue of energy but bring their expertise from the physical and life sciences, from technology and social science. The university believes that it is in such multidisciplinary approaches that solutions will be found to these complex problems.

It is my opinion that one of the reasons for the success of Cambridge—as is the case, of course, for Oxford and other universities—is its democratic management structure. At Cambridge, more than 3,500 people have the right to vote over every important decision proposed. Budgets are devolved to departments and not centrally controlled. Teams of researchers usually have total control over the use of their grants and their income from externally funded projects. It is all about trust. The best and most talented people can and should be trusted. If they are left alone they will do their work in the best possible way, following their own professional passion and enthusiasm. The simple fact is that that works. If we are going to bring out the best in people and see the best results from their efforts in higher education, it is infinitely more likely that they will work well if they are left free rather than regulated and controlled.

Of course, it is our students who count the most. I always feel a deep sense of pleasure when I see that Cambridge students record among the highest for satisfaction with their experience. Some 92% of Cambridge students declare themselves as happy with their experience in the years they spend there. These are astonishingly bright young women and men who come full of promise. No job is more important than the task of helping them to acquire the experiences, skills and knowledge that will help them to fulfil that promise.

Students now come to the university from many different backgrounds and different educational preparation. Cambridge devotes money and energy to outreach, searching for the best and brightest students from whatever background. The figures for admissions in 2012, the most recent to have been published, show that nearly 1,700 came from maintained schools as against only 1,149 from independent schools. During 2012-13, the university and its colleges, in its outreach activities, interacted with more than 8,000 schools and further education colleges, reaching out to more than 145,000 state school and college students at an investment cost of more than £4 million. The university also distributed £6.4 million to students from low-income households through the Cambridge bursary scheme, enabling them to study at the university without financial anxieties.

Within this pattern, Lucy Cavendish College, which I had the enormous pleasure to head for seven very happy years, plays a unique role in being the place where, by University of Cambridge statute and by its own statutes, women over the age of 21 may attend at a time of their own choosing, not at the conventional age of 18 or 19. There are more than 350 undergraduate and graduate students at the college coming from every conceivable walk of life—from the police force and the health service to the theatre, business and charities. Over one-third of them enter via non-traditional routes into higher education. The college provides a community and an environment in which women students from diverse and sometimes challenging or socially deprived backgrounds can achieve their full potential at a time in their lives and in an environment that is best suited to their needs. It also provides about one-third of them with scholarships and bursaries made possible by the generosity of our benefactors who share the vision of this unique college.

As I have focused on students, I should like to end with stories about two Lucy Cavendish College students of whom the college is rightly particularly proud. The first is a medical student who is the mother of four children. She had dropped out of school and left home by the age of 16. She is now in the fourth year of her medical degree with outstanding grades in her course and has just been awarded the William Harvey award for the top medical students in the university. What a turnaround that represents in someone’s life. Last year, an undergraduate was due to give birth at the same time as her final examinations, which might not be said to be good planning. She was determined to go ahead with her exams, so the college’s senior tutor arranged for a room at the maternity hospital to be designated by the university as an examination room—the first time that the university had ever done so. In spite of taking her exams literally immediately after delivering her baby, and while still wearing an intravenous drip in her arm, the student was awarded a first-class honours degree. For me, these stories are the real Cambridge, and the reality of what our good universities are doing to change lives and make the world just a little bit better.