Higher Education (Access and Participation Plans) (England) Regulations 2018

Baroness Wolf of Dulwich Excerpts

Monday 22nd January 2018 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Wolf of Dulwich (CB)]

My Lords, I too express my appreciation of the Secondary Legislation Scrutiny Committee, which drew these instruments to the special attention of the House because of the issues of public policy that they are likely to raise. The committee’s inquiries confirmed something that I believe noble Lords are well aware of, which is that the OfS has enormous and unprecedented powers to interfere in and directly manage our universities. When during the passage of the Bill we were pressing the Minister and the Government to take a more active interest in a number of areas, in particular an accelerated process for bestowing a university title, the response was that the regulator must be left to regulate. Professor Stephen Littlechild, who is the godfather of modern regulation, has recently been writing frequently about how much of it has gone wrong because the regulator and the Government seek to manage rather than to regulate. I have to say that the very short history of the OfS inclines me to feel that we are faced not with a Government who want to leave a regulator to regulate but with one who wish to tell the regulator precisely how to manage. Although it is too early to know, there is plenty of scope for doing this in the areas where these regulations are relevant.

Before I move on to my particular concerns, I would like to state for the record my interest as a full-time member of King’s College London and as a governor of our Mathematics School, which is very much a part of our current offer agreement. I am enormously proud of my university’s record on access. The way we have done it holds many lessons for others, so I pay tribute to that record and will use it to show how important it is for universities to really work at making it possible for young people from all backgrounds to realise their potential and to follow the courses for which they are suited.

However, there is a number of ways in which the current regulations go about changing the status quo ante and which have lurking within them some real risks. The particular focus is on participation by specified groups or those who are underrepresented and on tracking and demonstrating their success. No one could be against talented young people being admitted to university when they are able to benefit from it and do well while they are there, but if you are a timid administrator—most administrators are, by virtue of their position, somewhat timid—it is only too easy to read into this an invitation in effect to have quotas and to look at this as the thing that you have to fulfil in order to get your plan approved. Anyone with any sense of 20th-century history must feel deeply uneasy about this in spite of the Minister repeating, correctly, that at least in principle universities are to remain autonomous in their admissions processes.

I am very concerned about this emphasis, in particular the emphasis on supporting participation by specified students, not even groups but individual people, and the importance for a university to follow through on this. The wording is unnecessary and risky, and it makes me deeply uneasy. I worry that we may lose something which has been a huge piece of progress in my lifetime, which is that assessment is anonymous. This is something that student leaders and students feel strongly about. They feel that they should be marked on the basis of their work without one knowing who it is one is marking. As someone who does a great deal of marking, I think that they are absolutely right because I am always surprised when I find out who got which marks. In spite of the fact that I of course believe that I am objective and expert, it turns out that it is really hard to remove prior conceptions from your assessment if you know who people are. I am really quite anxious about this. I am anxious about the wording and the idea that we will be monitored, and whether we are tracking specified students to ensure that they are successful.

I simply want to lodge that and say that I hope that other legislation and conventions will protect the sector from what seem to be real risks lurking in the way that these regulations go beyond what we had and place far more emphasis not just on access and providing help to people, as we do with our special medical programme. We have a special introductory year. After that they are like everybody else. That is how they want it. I understand that the Government are trying to achieve something entirely worthy, but there are real risks here to which I would like to draw your Lordships’ attention.

[Lord Addington (LD)]

My Lords, I thank the Minister for introducing these regulations, particularly for drawing attention to the access and participation plan. It will come as no surprise to him that I will talk about disabled students. During the passage of the Bill and afterwards we had a long interaction about what would happen for disabled students. The Minister might say that this does not apply to disabled students, but they are an underrepresented group. I cannot see why, when we go through the rest of this, disabled students should be excluded.

The only reason might be because there are actions in place, but I am afraid that they are not very good. The noble Baroness, Lady Wolf, and I might be looking at different bits of this, but I think of it as the yin and yang of intervention. Universities now have to take on a far greater role in supporting disabled people who are getting less in the way of grants and support than under the old DSA system. Those with lesser needs are supposed to be dealt with by the institution. So far so good—it fits in with the Equality Act and those going through are paying fees.

The problem is that there is no universal guidance about a baseline or good practice. When we last looked at this, roughly half of disabled students were failing. We are saying that half of them did not have something successful in place. I went to see the wonderfully named disabled students sector leadership group, which prepared nearly a year ago Inclusive Teaching and Learning in Higher Education as a Route to Excellence—if ever there was a worse-named document, I have not come across it. When I asked where the guidance and the structure were, as it was taking on something new—remember that this was a year ago, although it was 18 months into the system; they had had a year’s warning—I was told, “We thought we’d let the courts sort it out”.

Apparently it has not moved on. People have individual programmes, some of which are related to the integrity of the university. We cannot tell them what to do. The Equality Act still applies to them, so how do these two processes combine? We have a group who will have problems completing their courses if we do not take some form of intervention. We know that because we have had a system that gave them individual support as an individual package as opposed to the institutional systems providing them. How do these two sets of approaches work together?

I have been on about this for quite a long time now, and I would like to get a definitive answer. Will the Office for Students take on the role of making sure that individual higher education institutions have a sufficiently good plan? Has it had long enough to identify those who are not doing it well? Other institutions have done it. How will it be made to improve things? The institutions risk losing students, and that loses fees. That is the institutions’ problem; society’s problem is the student with debt, no qualification and a sense of failure. I ask the Minister to give me some guidance today on how the Office for Students will sort this out. If it will not, why on earth is it there?