Higher Education and Research Bill

Baroness Wolf of Dulwich Excerpts

Monday 9th January 2017 Lords Chamber

[Viscount Hanworth (Lab)]

My Lords, I wish to speak to my own Amendment, Amendment 66, and in doing so I declare my interests as I did at Second Reading. In common with many commentators, I fear that the Bill gives unprecedented powers to the Secretary of State to interfere directly in the academic business of universities and providers of higher education. As it stands, the Bill will allow the Minister to give direct instructions to the Office for Students and it will allow that office in turn to convey specific instructions to universities and other providers. A separation of powers is required to prevent any agency acting in a manner that exceeds its competence or expertise and infringes on other domains for which independence should be guaranteed.

The Office for Students should be an executive body and not be allowed in its own right to pass judgment on academic standards. An independent body of experts should be relied on to assess the quality of the provision of higher education and to judge the standards of accreditation. My proposed amendment would clearly limit the power of the Secretary of State to give specific instructions to universities. The Bill already proposes that any guidance given by the Minister must apply to the providers of higher education in general, but it would also allow the Minister to declare, for example, that, “the course in epidemiology at the University of Middleshire does not conform to the guidelines issued by the Secretary of State under Section 3 of the Higher Education and Research Act 2017”. In other words, the Minister could refer to a specific university relative to the general guidelines that have been enunciated. My amendment would preclude the Minister from making such statements in respect of a specific institution. It should be for the Office for Students to make observations about the conformity of courses with guidelines and standards, and it should be allowed to do so only on the advice of a designated body of experts. This point will be reinforced in later amendments that I intend to bring forward.

[Baroness Wolf of Dulwich (CB)]

My Lords, I rise to speak to Amendments 55, 62, 72, 426 and 432, tabled in my name and those of the noble Baronesses, Lady Garden of Frognal and Lady Brown of Cambridge, and I will be very brief. I want to say how excellent is the amendment tabled by my noble friend Lord Kerslake because it encapsulates all our concerns about autonomy. I also agree with the eloquent speeches made by my noble friends Lord Kerslake and Lady Deech.

Importantly, these amendments deal with the whole of higher education, not just with universities. We will probably say this on a number of occasions in the weeks ahead, but we are in a new world in which higher and tertiary education is involving more and more of our citizens. Allowing institutions to decide which courses they teach and to be in control of how they deal with their academic staff and their students is absolutely critical to their ability to maintain standards and retain the autonomy that has served us very well.

[Baroness Blackstone (Lab)]

My Lords, I, too, strongly support the amendment in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Kerslake, which is extremely well worded and very appropriate for the legislation in front of us. I am absolutely convinced that the current Minister responsible for higher education will respect the institutional autonomy of universities, but some future Minister may not. As a former Minister responsible for higher and further education, I was rightly constrained by the 1988 Act and what Lord Jenkins managed to do with his amendment. There were sometimes times when I did not agree with what was happening, but I was unable to interfere, which would have been wholly inappropriate. That is an extremely good thing.

There is a second reason why I support the noble Lord’s amendment. I, along with Jo Ritzen, a very distinguished former Dutch Minister of Higher Education, and two other former European Education Ministers—Eduardo Grilo from Portugal and the former Hungarian Education Minister—embarked on a project led by Jo Ritzen entitled Empower European Universities. It looked at the position of universities across Europe—north, south, east and west—in particular at some of the problems some universities in eastern Europe experience, as in southern Europe. There was an incredible amount of state control over what these institutions could do. One of the outcomes of that is you get no innovation. Therefore, one of the reasons why we should promote autonomy in our higher education institutions is that we should be concerned to make sure universities do not stand still, that they take into account a changed environment and that they are innovative. By being autonomous they are far more likely to be innovative than if they are controlled by Governments, as we saw from the project we did across Europe.

Higher Education and Research Bill

Baroness Wolf of Dulwich Excerpts

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

[Baroness Garden of Frognal (LD)]

I, too, support the noble Lord, Lord Lipsey. The Office for Students was always a rather strange title for this all-encompassing and all-powerful body. It was particularly ironic because it took quite some effort to get students in any way involved with it or represented on it. The Office for Higher Education seems an eminently sensible title for it. As the noble Baroness, Lady Bakewell, said, that covers all the aspects that this strange body is going to be responsible for. The Minister should think very seriously about changing the title.

[Baroness Wolf of Dulwich (CB)]

My Lords, I agree that the Office for Students is a very strange name for this body. I take this opportunity to remind anybody in the House who does not already know how very opposed to much of what it is going to do most of our students are, and publicly so. Although the automatic response one gets when this is pointed out is, “Oh, they just don’t want their fees put up”, that is not the sole thing they are complaining about—not at all. I also take this opportunity to put on record my appreciation of the University of Warwick student union, with which I have no connection whatever, which wrote an extremely well-thought-out critique of the Bill back in June, which was the first thing to alert me to many of the things that I have become very concerned about since. I agree with the noble Lord, Lord Lipsey, that this is not an appropriate title and it would be very good if we could come up with another—but I do not think I will be collecting his champagne.

[Lord Stevenson of Balmacara (Lab)]

My Lords, of course the serious side to the light-hearted comments is that the name will conceal as much as it will reveal about what is going on here. I understand entirely my noble friend Lord Lipsey’s wish to raise this in a relatively light-hearted way and I do not want to be a party pooper but we need a lot more certainty about what exactly this new architecture, which was one of the great calling cards of the Bill when it was first introduced, is actually going to do and deliver.

A number of amendments further down the list will bear on this and we may well need to return to the name once—and only once—we have decided what we are going to have. For instance, we are now told that the Office for Fair Access will have a slightly different role in government amendments due to be discussed on the next day in Committee. That will change the nature of what the OfS does because, if the government amendments are accepted, it will not be allowed to delegate powers that would normally be given to the Office for Fair Access to anybody else, and it will have to ensure that the director of the Office for Fair Access has a particular role to play in relation to access agreements that are created under that regime. In that sense, the power of the OfS as originally conceived was already diluted at the Government’s own behest. We need to think that through before we make a final decision in this area.

The question of how registration is to take place is a quasi-regulatory function. We have an elephant parading around the Bill—it is supposed to walk around in a room but perhaps we ought not to extend the metaphor too far—in the role of the CMA, to which I hope the Minister will refer. If we are talking about regulatory functions, we need to understand better and anticipate well where the CMA’s remit stops and starts. The Minister was not on the Front Bench when the consumer affairs Act was taken through Parliament last year, but that Act is the reason why the CMA now operates in this area. It is extracting information and beginning to obtain undertakings from higher education providers regarding what they will and will not do in the offers they make through prospectuses, the letters sent out under the guise of UCAS, the obligations placed thereby on the students who attend that institution and the responsibilities of the institution itself. I do not wish to go too deep into it at this stage because there will be other opportunities to do so, but until we understand better the boundaries between the Office for Students and the CMA, it will be hard to know what regulatory functions will remain with the OfS and what name it would therefore be best put under. “Office” is common to many regulators but the letters in acronyms can also be changed.

We are back to where we were on the last group: we are not yet sure what the assessment criteria and regimes will be, but perhaps we know more about the criteria than the regime. It is one thing if a committee is to be established with responsibility for assessing the fitness to be on the register and the quality of the teaching as provided. But if an independent body were established and called the quality assurance office or some such similar name, as it would be under a later amendment, it would be doing a lot of the work currently allocated to the Office for Students. I do not have answers to any of these points. I am sure that the Minister will give us some guidance but it would be helpful, when he is ready and able to do so, if he set out in a letter exactly what he thinks the architecture might look like and what the justification therefore is for the name.

The most poignant point was that made by the noble Baroness, Lady Garden: that an Office for Students without student representation on it seems completely bonkers. I do not understand why the Government continue to move down this path. The amendment brought in on Report in the other place was one of sorts to try to move towards that. But it is a measure of the Government’s inability to grasp the issues here in a firm and convincing way that the person who is expected to occupy that place at the Office for Students, as provided for by the amendment, is somebody able to represent students. It is not necessarily a student, which seems a little perverse. I put it no more strongly than that.

Given that the current draft arrangements in the higher education sector for obtaining metrics relating to the grading of teaching quality in institutions has five students on the main committee and two or three students allocated to each of the working groups set up to look at individual institutions, there is obviously a willingness at that level to operate with and be engaged with students. Why is that not mirrored in the Office for Students? Regarding further use, it is really important that we get that nailed down. If it were a genuinely student-focused body—a provision which many governing bodies have—then the Office for Students might well be the right name for it. But until those questions are answered, I do not understand why the Committee would not accept my noble friend Lord Lipsey’s sensible suggestion.

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[Baroness Wolf of Dulwich]

It looks like I am going to be the last speaker, noble Lords will be relieved to know. I support the general tenor of all the amendments in this group, particularly Amendment 7 and the idea that people’s experience should be current or recent. That is extraordinarily important, particularly in an area such as higher education which changes very fast. A number of noble Lords have talked about the importance of further education and the importance of—and decline in the number of—part-time students. We are concerned about these extraordinarily important things, yet it seems that none of the current authorities and institutions which deal with higher education has much idea about why this has happened. We did not intend to have the decline in part-time students that we have. Government after Government have talked of the importance of increasing the role of further education colleges in higher education, because they are central to the availability of part-time courses, retraining and lifelong learning. Yet the role of further education has not in fact increased. The numbers have not increased and the proportion has tended to decline.

So these are real challenges. But it also seems to me that one of the reasons we have got ourselves into this situation is that we do not have enough people with current and recent experience involved at the highest levels of policy-making. Therefore, of all these amendments, I most strongly support the proposal that the Office for Students should look for people to join its board who are deeply involved in the sector in the areas which it is looking for, not people who can tick a box because 20 years ago they were on the board of governors of something. I hope very much that the Minister will take that point away and think about it. I cannot see any way in which it undermines the purposes of the Bill and of government policy. That one small thing might make a big difference to the effectiveness of the Office for Students.

[Viscount Younger of Leckie]

My Lords, I say at the outset that once again I have shortened my comments, bearing in mind the hour. Nevertheless, these amendments need to be properly addressed, so I hope that the Committee will bear with me.

I reassure noble Lords that the Government are committed to a fair and open appointment process for the OfS chair. The final appointment will be made by the Secretary of State, but the process will allow for scrutiny of the appointment by Parliament. We have previously stated our openness to a committee of Parliament scrutinising the nomination of the chair of the OfS before the final appointment is made. I confirm that there will be this opportunity for parliamentary scrutiny in the appointment of the first chair—for whom the selection process is well under way, as noble Lords may know. I note that the noble Lord, Lord Liddle, agrees that the chair of the OfS should not be ratified by a resolution of Parliament but that there should be parliamentary scrutiny. That is correct, despite some comments made this evening that were not particularly in favour of that.

Amendments 4 and 18 would be a departure from the accepted practice set out in the governance code. It is standard practice for the chairs of regulators to be appointed by the respective Secretary of State. We believe that our plans for scrutiny are sufficient and that it is right that the Secretary of State should retain the power to appoint the chair of the OfS board.

Throughout the development of this legislation, the Government have engaged and consulted widely with students and their representatives and we are committed to ensuring that this approach is reflected in the final OfS structure and arrangements. We have already amended the Bill in the other place to ensure that at least one of the ordinary members of the OfS must have experience of representing or promoting the interests of students.

As regards the comments just made by the noble Baroness, Lady Wolf, and the noble Lord, Lord Stevenson, requiring one member of the OfS board to be currently engaged in representing students, as proposed by Amendment 5, would narrow the choice of potential candidates for this role. It could potentially exclude someone who has excellent recent experience of representing students but who has since gone into the working world or further study, thus gaining valuable experience and skills. Furthermore, the standard length of term for public appointments is four years. As such, insisting that the student representative be a current student risks being incompatible with the standard time lines of most courses of study or sabbatical roles as student representatives. That is why we chose the form of wording that we put forward on Report in the other place.

I turn now to the desirability criteria for the OfS board appointments. The Government believe that it is essential that the OfS board should be representative of the broader range of stakeholders in the higher education system. The current legislation that sets out the appointment process for appointments to the current HEFCE board requires the Secretary of State to have regard to experience of higher education, business or the professions. I reiterate that this has worked well for many decades. None the less, this legislation goes further in ensuring a diverse range of board members by setting out seven desirability criteria. These include experience of providing higher education and experience of creating, reviewing, implementing or managing a regulatory system. The seven criteria have been framed broadly so that they allow for flexibility to include board members with the breadth and depth of experience and skills. The Bill in its current form preserves the crucial flexibility for the Secretary of State to constitute the OfS board in the most appropriate way for the challenges and opportunities of the particular day. I reiterate that we need to form a framework that allows us to look ahead a long period of time.

Higher Education and Research Bill

Baroness Wolf of Dulwich Excerpts

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

[Lord Stevenson of Balmacara (Lab)]

My Lords, happy new year, and a particular welcome to our respected guest standing at the Bar, who for those of your Lordships who were not present at Second Reading set a new record for MPs standing listening to debates. I gather he is here again to do a repeat performance. We should welcome his interest and his commitment to this issue, which I know is shared by so many Members of the House. I am very grateful to the noble Baronesses, Lady Garden, Lady Wolf and Lady Brown, for joining me and supporting Amendment 1. I look forward to hearing their comments and those of other noble Lords across the Committee who have indicated to me that they support the amendment.

I declared my interests in higher education during the excellent Second Reading debate we held in the Chamber last month. Even if I had not been to a university, never worked in the university sector or not had my children educated in UK universities, I would have wanted to engage with the Bill because our excellent university sector—currently the second most successful higher education system in the world, with four universities ranked in the top 10—faces substantial challenges in the years ahead. It could, of course, be improved and it could, of course, be more innovative, and we support both those aims, but it also needs to be supported and protected, particularly if we go ahead with a hard Brexit, as now seems inevitable.

The abiding sense I have from our Second Reading debate is that the Bill fails to understand the purposes of higher education. I suggest that without defining these important institutions, there is a danger that the new regulatory architecture, the new bodies and the revised research organisation will do real and permanent damage. Universities across the world have multiple and complex roles in society, and there is no doubt that we all gain from that. They come in all sizes, and that too is good. They are at their best when they are autonomous, independent institutions which have the freedom to develop a range of missions and practices, while at the same time being public institutions, serving the knowledge economy and the knowledge society as well as being tools of economic progress and social mobility. They use the precious safe harbour of academic freedom to seek truth wherever it is to be found and publish it for all to see and discuss. They transmit and project values of openness, tolerance, inquiry and a respect for diversity that are the key to civilisation in an increasingly globalised world.

The purpose of the amendment is simple. The Bill before us does not define a university, and we think it will be improved if it does so. Our amendment does not simply itemise some of the core functions of a university, though it does that too, but also scopes out a university’s role, with its implicit ideals of responsibility, engagement and public service. A characteristic of all these functions is the expectation that universities take the long-term view and nurture a long-term stake in their local communities and wider society; that they embed scholarship and original and independent inquiry into their activities; and that they demonstrate a sustained commitment to serving the public good through taking up a role as critic and as the conscience of society.

I am confident that there is support for this approach across the House, based on the real sense of disappointment at the lack of ambition that the Bill currently exhibits. I hope the Government will feel able to accept the amendment. I say to the Minister that if he were minded to do so, not only would he improve the Bill but he would be signalling a willingness to listen to all the expertise, experience and wisdom that this House possesses and give us hope that he wished to use that for the benefit of this important sector and of the country as a whole. If he does not feel able to accept the amendment as it stands, perhaps he could offer to take it back and bring it back in an improved version on Report. If he did this, we would of course be very willing to work with him on how to improve the text—we have no pride of ownership.

I have to warn him, though, that if he does not want to engage as I have outlined, he will have to explain to this House what it is he cannot accept about specifying that universities have a secure and valued place in our society, and why he has difficulty in confirming that our universities should have statutory rights to institutional autonomy, academic freedom and freedom of speech. He will have to explain why he disagrees with his right honourable friend the Minister for Universities, Science, Research and Innovation, who is standing at the Bar, who said in response to questions in Committee in the other place:

“At its most literal, a university can be described as a provider of predominantly higher education that has got degree-awarding powers and has been given the right to use the university title. That is the most limited and literal sense. If we want a broader definition, we can say that a university is also expected to be an institution that brings together a body of scholars to form a cohesive and self-critical academic community that provides excellent learning opportunities for people, the majority of whom are studying to degree level or above. We expect teaching at such an institution to be informed by a combination of research, scholarship and professional practice. To distinguish it from what we conventionally understand the school’s role to be, we can say that a university is a place where students are developing higher analytical capacities—critical thinking, curiosity about the world and higher levels of abstract capacity in their thinking. In brief, that is my answer to what a university is”.—[Official Report, Commons, Higher Education and Research Bill Committee, 15/09/16; col. 271.]

I confess to a little plagiarism in drafting my amendment, which I acknowledge is clearly based on that Minister’s approach, which is the correct one. I beg to move.

[Baroness Wolf of Dulwich (CB)]

My Lords, the Bill we are debating today is an enormously important one. I declare an interest as a full-time academic at King’s College London.

The Government are creating the environment in which universities will operate and thrive or decline over many years, probably decades, and are changing it profoundly. Because a country’s universities and the nature of those universities are so central to what a country is—to its values, politics, culture, research and innovation—the Bill is truly important to the whole nation. Yet, curiously, the Bill has nothing to say about universities, as you will find if you have a quick search of the document. It says quite a lot about the university title, and at one point it refers to unauthorised degrees at,

“a university, college or other body”,

by grant, but that is it. Otherwise it refers consistently to “providers”.

Clearly, the Government do not think that the term “university” is meaningless. If it were, neither the Government nor higher education providers nor universities would be so occupied with the university title.

When I dug around a bit, I found that previous legislation also has extraordinarily little to say on the subject. The 1992 higher education Act refers simply to use of the name “university” in the title of an institution, and informs us hopefully that, if the power to change the name is exercisable with the consent of the Privy Council, it may be exercised, with that consent,

“whether or not the institution would apart from this section be a university”.

There is nothing more on what a university is. The Minister has kindly confirmed, in replies to Written Questions that the term is not defined in legislation but is a “sensitive” word under company law, which means that you need permission from the Secretary of State and a non-objection letter before you can use it in a business or company title.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Triesman (Lab)]

My Lords, I should probably have declared my interests in my Second Reading speech—but they are in the register and I declare them now.

I will start with a theme that the noble Baroness, Lady Deech, and other noble Lords brought up: autonomy. I shall not, given how long the debate has gone on, repeat the points that the noble Lord, Lord Smith of Finsbury, my noble friend Lord Winston and other noble Lords made. In particular, my noble friend Lady Warwick made a substantive speech which I hope will command the attention of the House. I remind the House of the mechanisms that we utilised in the past to try to ensure that university autonomy was sustained whatever the Government of the day, however unpopular or controversial the issues that might be raised, and however much public sentiment might not approve of them.

All through the history of modern universities, this country has inserted buffer arrangements between the state and higher education—and that is not an accident. It was an absolutely deliberate intention to make sure that the great qualities of universities could be sustained, irrespective of the calamities—the world wars and the other huge movements in tectonic plates. There was the UGC, later HEFCE, and even, when the polytechnics were going through the process of becoming universities, the work of the CNAA, which was designed to make sure that the older universities played a part in ensuring that the quality of the newer universities would be sufficiently adequate or better than sufficiently adequate to take their place as universities among the entire group—a system which worked well in England, Scotland and, as far as I am aware, in Wales. However, in every single case, and in particular in relation to teaching, the processes were both thorough on the part of those buffer bodies and also a protection of the autonomy and independence of universities so that they could pursue matters with genuine academic freedom.

In the field of research, the work that was originally done on quality assurance was never made prescriptive in a way that interfered with the autonomy of universities but expressed a desire to see great excellence being achieved in those places where it was possible and a broader spread of excellence in those places which perhaps could not do some of the work in particle physics or whatever it might be. I can remember—it is one of the interests I have declared—the negotiations with the noble Lord, Lord Boswell, about the character of the research excellence framework that he wished to see. Even the annual letter from the Secretary of State, first to HEFCE and then through the more recent period, was a general outline of what the expectations of the country were. It was never a set of orders to which universities must subscribe, which would lead, were they not to do so, to them being closed, cut back or denigrated. These were genuine protections. I am not trying to repeat a Second Reading point but these were the values to which this country signed up in 1997 in the UNESCO normative treaty on academic freedom and the independence of institutions, which this Bill would tear up.

I think that very careful thought about this amendment, which I intend to support, would be repaid, and the Minister will have to give very convincing reasons why, even in Committee, we should not consider it. Some of the arguments that have been put forward in your Lordships’ House this afternoon do not bear much examination. For example, as my noble friend Lady Cohen said, it is not the case that universities must all provide the full range of subjects. The wording is “an extensive range”.

I put it to the noble Lord, Lord Willetts, for whom I have great admiration, that it is not the case that many of the more specialist institutions are so narrow that they do not do a wide range of things, as those of us who have had the privilege of being Ministers covering higher education will know. Imperial College London was mentioned a while ago. The college is rich in every science, including all the social sciences, and it has absolutely magnificent ratings in all those areas. Even the conservatoire music colleges have usually extended their range. SOAS is certainly another example—and there are many. For the avoidance of doubt, there may be an opportunity in what the Minister says to achieve greater specificity regarding what we mean, but in my view that is the bottom line.

In conclusion, I am absolutely astounded by our squeamishness in worrying about whether we can define a university. There have no doubt been massive debates right across time about whether we can do that. I remember recently reading an account of whether Bob Dylan really had created literature, and there was a huge debate about what literature might be. There are always debates about these broader concepts. However, broadly speaking, when you go around the world and talk to people about coming to a university in the United Kingdom, they know very well what you mean. It is not an accident that so many people apply to come to the United Kingdom to study in our universities and they do not all complain that the terminology is fusty and old. I can imagine a focus group saying, “If only we didn’t call them universities. Let’s call them ‘higher education providers’ and floods of people will suddenly appear. The marketing will be transformed”. People come because of their expectations.

I say to the noble Lord, Lord Hodgson, that there may very well be people who are dissatisfied, or whose children are dissatisfied—but, broadly speaking, when you look at the number of people who want to come here and who understand perfectly well what we offer, you do not see a system that has broken down, although of course it could do with some reform. I have looked high and low to see what crisis the Bill is intended to resolve and I do not believe that it can be found. If it could, I can tell your Lordships that three areas for which I used to have responsibility—the Chevening, Marshall and Commonwealth scholarships—would be devoid of people wanting them. On the contrary, every single one of them is fought for.

[Baroness Wolf of Dulwich]

My Lords, I apologise for taking more of the Committee’s time but I feel that we are losing sight of one of the major reasons why my name is attached to this amendment. I believe very strongly that we have to consider, up front, a definition of a university in the Bill. It is a question not of whether we do or do not have a definition but of who controls that definition. Absolutely rightly, the Bill distinguishes between degree-awarding powers and the title of “university”. So it should and so it must, because we are now in a world where many institutions which are not and will never wish to be universities give degrees. Further education colleges are a very obvious and important sector.

We are also, I am delighted to say, moving into a world with degree apprenticeships. The question is whether the definition of a university is perhaps not super-precise but clear and perfectly workable, like almost every other definition in legislation all over this land, or whether we leave the decisions about what a university is to the bureaucrats of the Office for Students, who will make those decisions but will never actually have to make them public.

So I come back to the purpose of this amendment and why we feel it is so important. If we do not have a definition in the legislation, there will be a definition but we will none of us have any control over it and we will never know what it is.

Private Colleges

Baroness Wolf of Dulwich Excerpts

Wednesday 21st December 2016 Lords Chamber

[Viscount Younger of Leckie]

One of our reforms is to set up the Office for Students, as I mentioned earlier. It will provide one register to set a level playing field. This means that if, in what would perhaps be an unusual case, a private provider does not meet the standards required, there are student protection processes in place. That is an important part of our checks and controls.

[Baroness Wolf of Dulwich (CB)]

My Lords, as the Minister will know, additional powers were taken recently to allow the Home Office and what was then BIS to place caps on numbers where there were concerns about quality and recruitment among private providers. It appears that that power will be lost under the provisions of the Higher Education and Research Bill, which will impose quality restrictions but, if provisional degree-awarding powers are given, will set no caps on numbers. In other words, the Government are actually getting rid of some of the powers that they have taken in recent years. I would be grateful if the Minister could clarify if this is indeed the case and whether it would not be wise to retain for new institutions the ability to place a clear cap on student recruitment numbers.

[Viscount Younger of Leckie]

The new alternative providers, such as the recently announced Dyson Institute, will include some student number controls, but there will be a rigorous risk-based approach to quality assurance and a moratorium on the designation of new higher national courses. There will also be a fit-and-proper-person test for the running of APs. The noble Baroness and I will meet later and I look forward to talking further to her about that issue.

Educational Attainment: International Rankings

Baroness Wolf of Dulwich Excerpts

Tuesday 13th December 2016 Lords Chamber

[Lord Nash]

As the noble Lord knows, our emphasis on teacher training has been on in-school training, but we have the highest number of trainees in science for five years; physics—traditionally our hardest subject to recruit for—is up 15% on last year; and we have recruited in excess of our targets in biology, geography and history.

[Baroness Wolf of Dulwich (CB)]

The PISA studies lend themselves to cross-country comparisons which, like any league table, are always tremendously attractive to readers. However, they also purport to measure absolute standards, which are ultimately more important. There is a somewhat spurious use of tiny differences—from, for example, 827 to 828. Does the Minister have any information on, or plans to do any research into, whether or not there have actually been changes in the absolute standard of achievement of British children on the PISA tests?

[Lord Nash]

I think the absolute standard has remained fairly static, but in view of the noble Baroness’s excellent work on education reform, I do not want to enter into a discussion, and I will write to her about that.

Higher Education and Research Bill

Baroness Wolf of Dulwich Excerpts

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

[Baroness Wolf of Dulwich (CB)]

My Lords, I welcome this opportunity to talk about one of the most important sectors in a liberal, free, democratic society. I declare an interest as a professor and a member of council at King’s College London.

I find myself asking: why are we here now, debating this Bill? Ministers have noted that the sector has called for some changes in the arrangements but, according to our representative body, Universities UK, the main thing that seemed to be needed was a single register. Obviously, a single register is desirable but it is not quite clear how we move from that to 120 pages of Bill, even when you add in a merging of research councils. It becomes understandable, perhaps, when you look at what seems to be the Bill’s actual and huge ambition, which is my main topic.

It seems clear to me, as it does to other noble Lords, that what we have here proposes a dramatic change in how government relates to our universities. It will change the entire dynamic of that relationship. It will do so for the worse and in ways that the Government will find difficult to control and we will all find difficult to reverse. The Bill talks about markets but what it mostly proposes are major new powers for individual Secretaries of State and for the new quango that the legislation creates. There is a fundamental shift here—for universities, for Ministers and for Parliament and the Crown.

The Government’s response to concerns about the impact on academic freedom and institutional autonomy is welcome but it does not go nearly far enough. The Bill provides for undesirable changes in the way that degree-awarding powers can be bestowed. It provides for validation arrangements that create a manifest conflict of interest for the regulator. It proposes controls over academic standards of the like we have not seen in this country. We are being asked to give a quango the authority to overrule and revoke powers granted to universities by centuries-old statutes and royal charters. All this will have a knock-on effect on institutional autonomy and critical thought and inquiry, and it will corrode the willingness of universities to speak truth to power. It feels as though England is changing the whole structure of university governance in ways that have not been thought through properly.

Most worryingly, the Government do not seem to have taken on board the fact that they are increasing dramatically the power of future Governments to put direct pressure on individual institutions. I am not suggesting for a moment that the current Government are proposing to do that or have any thought of doing it. But powers that exist are used; we know that, and that they can be abused. Even though I feel they are not likely to be abused by this Government, they may well be abused by Governments in the not-so-distant future. I invite your Lordships to imagine the Government and the Secretary of State for Education of their worst nightmares, equipped with the powers in the Bill—and then to go back to the Bill to see how many opportunities it would offer such a person to put pressure on an institution.

British universities have been independent, and have been successful and globally admired because of that independence. Indeed, it is one of the glories of Britain—and, I suggest, central to maintaining the values of a liberal democracy—that, unlike those of far too many other countries, our universities have not been subject to direct ministerial or governmental command. I agree strongly with the noble Lord, Lord Waldegrave, that it is absolutely vital that societies have multiple pillars and centres of power because that is what maintains our independence. It is also what makes us able to do good and innovative things which can change the world for the better and, hopefully, not for the worse. Universities excel when they are free. If you say this, there is a danger of being told, “Oh, but you’re a vested interest—you want to oppose this only because you’re fine”. It would be complacent to think that a system such as ours will survive whatever. Back in the 1990s, our system was on the brink of rapid decline, not the sort of global excellence that we have in fact attained. Anyone who doubts how easy it is to destroy a great university should visit the Sorbonne of today.

Lastly and quickly, I turn to a second subject: the students who are at the heart of the Bill. I am sure the Government are sincere in believing that, but students actually hate the Bill. The organised student unions and student societies of this country are, to put it mildly, unenthused. This is not just because the Bill seems to provide a way to increase yet further fees that are already huge. They also feel they are being invited to come out of an institution which they had been told was an excellent part of a globally renowned system with debts of £50,000 or more, only then to discover that it was not actually a gold institution at all but a bronze institution—and part of a system whose global reputation is plummeting. If students enter an institution with a gold label and it has a bronze one by the time they come out, will the Government offer them any compensation?

The other reason why students are unhappy is that they are going to pay for it. I agree with my noble friend Lord Williams that this will be expensive. There will be a large bureaucracy with more regulatory activity, and more bureaucrats cost money, externally and internally. Universities will be paying for the Office for Students and since tuition fees are our main source of income, and the source we can use freely, students will pay for all this.

The Bill went through the Commons almost unnoticed, in my view, but the turnout today shows that many Lords here feel that it is a very important Bill. A free country needs its higher education institutions to be free, too. Amendments to the Bill are vital and well worth fighting for.

Brexit: Impact on Universities and Scientific Research

Baroness Wolf of Dulwich Excerpts

Thursday 3rd November 2016 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Wolf of Dulwich (CB)]

I too congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Soley, on securing this debate and, like many other noble Lords, declare an interest. I am a full-time academic at King’s College London and professor of public sector management; I run a postgraduate degree and also a research centre on international higher education policy.

Many noble Lords have spoken eloquently about the immediate concerns of the higher education sector and the worries that everyone has in the aftermath of the referendum. I would like to mention a couple of more general issues and give the discussion a little more historical context. It is important to remember this although we are indeed in something of a golden age for higher education in this country, it is very recent. Twenty years ago, this country’s higher education sector looked very different and in imminent danger of near collapse, not of becoming, as we have heard, one of what are clearly the two leading systems in the world.

The noble Viscount, Lord Ridley, noted the five British Nobel prize winners currently in the United States. Of course, they did not leave because of Brexit or for any reasons to do with the EU; they left when, not long ago, we had a massive exodus from British science because the conditions were so poor. The past 15 years have been very good for British higher education for a number of reasons, which include greatly increased support in many—not all—areas of research from the Government and the arrival of both fees for home students and growing numbers of overseas students.

It is important to recognise that the general context, particularly the economic context, has a huge impact on what happens to higher education and that, whatever happens with EU programmes, we are in for a very uncomfortable couple of decades because everything will be so uncertain. Our US staff have just taken a 20% pay cut, which will obviously have an impact.

It is also important to realise that although we seem to have been in a glorious period, a number of things in higher education have not been going so wonderfully. Now that everything is up for grabs, I hope that the Government will take note of where a number of things that we have been able to do have papered over cracks within our system and the education system of our country. The noble Baroness, Lady Blackstone, referred to this. Many of our departments, particularly those which require quantitative skills, are recruiting overseas and EU staff not only because they want to be open to all the talents, but because it is extremely difficult to find any British candidates. You can see the impact of that in departments of mathematics or in any of the quantitative social sciences.

I urge the Government, in considering both immigration and higher education policy, to take note of the fact that there are major problems with the education system of this country which mean that we are not nurturing the talent we need for the next generation of higher education researchers and academics. That should be a priority for the next few years.

Perhaps most importantly, I want to refer to the new political environment. Several noble Lords, including the noble Lords, Lord Giddens and Lord Haskel, referred to the Higher Education and Research Bill. We are now in a very strange political environment. We have a higher education Bill coming through which proclaims the glories of the market and of open entry for new institutions while in fact increasing enormously the level of micromanagement and regulation of the whole sector.

My fear is that we have a train crash advancing, because we have that on the one side and on the other a Home Office determined to reduce immigration and also—in many ways rightly—concerned about low-quality providers. That is not the Home Office’s job, but in its defence, it has a record of detecting and closing fraudulent language schools. The terror now is that it seems to feel that it can identify high-quality and low-quality institutions and fine-tune immigration in those terms. That is a dreadful prospect. Good university systems are those that have autonomous institutions. Whatever other parts of government may be telling it, there is no way that it can take a simple metric to decide whether an institution is good or bad and tie immigration facilities to that measure.

I ask the Minister to assure us that the Government are indeed aware that they do not have a valid, tested metric for judging the quality of an institution and that any measures relying on such a metric are bound not only to fail in their objectives but to do enormous damage to the quality of the higher education sector.

Teachers: Academies and Free Schools

Baroness Wolf of Dulwich Excerpts

Monday 12th September 2016 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Wolf of Dulwich (CB)]

My Lords, it is a great privilege to congratulate the noble Baroness, Lady Finn, on her excellent maiden speech. Everyone here knows how difficult it can be to get things done in government quickly and effectively given the nature of the modern governmental beast, and how central advisers are to that task. I know that every senior civil servant will agree on this. The noble Baroness brings from her government service a wealth of experience in getting things done in government that will be invaluable to the crucial role of this House of detailed legislative scrutiny. I am sure that we all look forward very much to her future contributions to our debates.

I need to declare two interests with respect to this Question for Short Debate: as a founding governor of King’s College London Mathematics School, to which I will return; and as the author of a report, the Wolf Review of Vocational Education, which had some direct influence on current government policies on qualified teachers. I still stand by the recommendations I made in that report but, before explaining what they were and why I made them, I turn to the question of what it means to be qualified.

Of course we all want teachers to be qualified. If you do that useful trick of turning a question around and asking people how they would feel about the Government increasing the number of unqualified teachers, you would probably find them looking at you as though you were about to lose your faculties. But I wonder how many people outside the world of education understand fully what the term “qualified teacher” means. I am sure that everyone in this Chamber knows, but I have been struck by the fact that most people tend to assume that the term encapsulates within it a great deal about subject knowledge and mastery of the subject being taught. But having qualified teacher status is about whether someone has gone through training as a teacher. In our current system, someone is able to teach a subject in which they have no formal academic or professional expertise or qualifications as long as they have qualified teacher status. I think that these are very different things and that we should worry a great deal more than we appear to about how many teachers in our system are not qualified in the sense of having a full mastery of the areas in which they teach.

Perhaps I may quote in their rather turgid form the two recommendations I made in the Review of Vocational Education, which I submitted to the then Government in 2011 and they accepted in full. The first ran as follows:

“At present teachers with QTS can teach in FE colleges; the FE equivalent—QTLS—should be recognised in schools, which is currently not the case. This will enable schools to recruit qualified professionals to teach courses at school level … with clear efficiency gains”.

There are more than efficiency gains, but that is what I wrote. The reason I had to make that recommendation was because there had been such resistance in the schools sector to recognising the qualified teacher status of people in FE, and this is an issue to which I will return in a moment.

The second relevant qualification stated that the Government should:

“Clarify and evaluate rules relating to the teaching of vocational content by qualified professionals who are not primarily teachers/do not hold QTLS. Many schools believe that it is impossible to bring professionals in to demonstrate/teach even part of a course without requiring the presence of additional, salaried teaching staff. This further reduces the incidence of high quality vocational teaching, delivered to the standards that industries actually require”.

Why was this so important? It relates to the issues raised by the noble Baroness, Lady Morris. We are systematically excluding people from classrooms who have the skills, knowledge and expertise that we need because they do not have QTS and there is no obvious way for the schools concerned to get around it. This is more of a problem in the highly specialised areas than it is in mainstream education. We have to realise that if people have to spend two years getting qualified teacher status, which is a long route, they will not come into teaching even though they have genuine and important expertise. In the vocational and technical areas, which are what interest me most, you want people in classrooms and workshops whose main occupation or career is not teaching, but who can bring with them the up-to-date, high-level skills and expertise that are needed.

That was why I made these recommendations. I must underline at this point that the schools’ objections for many years to recognising any other form of QTS are not something they should be proud of. Also, this is not just about vocational skills. I mentioned that I am a founding governor of King’s College London Mathematics School, which is a free school and takes highly talented young 16 to 19 year-olds from across London to give them, in our view, a high-quality mathematics education. We expect our full-time teachers to have QTS. We think that that is important to their careers and that, in the programmes we send them on, it really increases their skills and capabilities. However, it is absolutely important to us that we should also be able to bring in highly skilled and qualified mathematicians at the top of their game without having to worry that, when Ofsted comes to call, we will be told we have done something we should not. There is a major issue here and no simple way round it.

I also worry about a blanket demand for this. The evidence for such demands for qualification or licensing is not terribly encouraging. Morris Kleiner, the leading academic analyst of licensing, studied its impact on price and quality all around the world. He finds that the general result is to raise prices for ordinary people and increase salaries without any indication that you get a general improvement in quality. It tends to be promoted by practitioners. My favourite example, which is not an English one, is that in Michigan the state licensing board requires 1,460 days of training to become a licensed athletics trainer. A good number of American states also license beekeepers and ballroom dance instructors.

Obviously, there are things where you want a licence to be absolutely sure that people are actually able to do what they are doing. I doubt that anybody in this House would want people able to practise medicine who were not licensed and carefully regulated. Yet the skills they practise in medicine are the medical skills. We currently have a situation in this country—I reiterate this—in which you are allowed to teach maths without knowing anything very much about maths. That seems to be of far greater significance than the fact that, outside the academy and free school sector, you will not do it without QTS. That is the major issue.

In passing I say that, again to my great regret, the evidence on blanket requirements for further pedagogical training is somewhat depressing. It does not seem to have any guaranteed impact. That is not to say that it cannot do so. Rather, this is a very difficult issue and not one that you can solve by demanding pedagogical training for everybody.

To finish, I make the same point once again: we at least have more information on whether teachers are qualified to teach their subjects than we did 10 years ago. However, we still take far too lightly the threat to the quality of education from the number of teachers who teach, often unhappily, in subjects where they have very limited subject knowledge at a high level. Have the Government any plans to address that serious issue, which to my mind is more important than that of QTS?

Schools: Admissions

Baroness Wolf of Dulwich Excerpts

Thursday 8th September 2016 Grand Committee

[Baroness Wolf of Dulwich (CB)]

My Lords, I congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, on securing this debate. I declare my interest as a governor of King’s College London Mathematics School, which is a state-funded school for 16 to 19 year-olds, sponsored by my university and employer, King’s College London. I have therefore had first-hand experience of struggling with the construction of admissions codes that can be clearly understood by potential parents and students.

Like the noble Lord, Lord Knight, I found myself agreeing with just about everything the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, said. However, I would like to say a little about the nature of the information that is provided to parents. The complexity of that information seems to be a problem in and of itself. There is a very real danger—I will duck the grammar school question, which would just make it even more complex—that in responding to perceived problems we will actually end up increasing the complexity of the codes and the fact that parents are faced with more and more information that they cannot really cope with.

Because it is not my own experience, I have been struck by the perception of many people that schools are already trying to manipulate their criteria in such a way that they are in fact selecting parents. For example, John Dunford, who was once general secretary of the Association of School and College Leaders, believes that some schools are making it as opaque as possible for parents in order to maximise the chance that those schools will receive fewer applications from children from poorer homes. As I have said, that is not my personal experience in any of the schools that I have had to deal with, but from this very complexity comes the perception that these rules are very hard to understand and that, when it comes to appeals, it is much easier for middle-class and educated parents to know how to appeal and to do so successfully.

I hope I will be able to persuade the Minister that the answer to this is not more and more complex codes. That would be a tempting and easy route to go down but my own experience, which has been borne out by many other people who have tried to create all-singing, all-dancing, totally transparent codes, is that that is not something that works.

Both noble Lords who have already spoken have alluded to the fact that we are in a system of school choice. Obviously, you get rid of admissions problems if you simply allow the state to decide where every young person should go. Personally I am not in favour of that, but if you have a system in which you have oversubscribed schools, as is very likely, you essentially have two options: either you use a lottery or you have rules for deciding who gets a place in an oversubscribed institution. In fact, we have some experience of what happens with lotteries because Brighton and Hove tried it out. The experience was an educational one, in the sense that it was a field day for the researchers, but it was also rather depressing because the reality was that it did not improve access. That was not the result, partly because they did not go for a complete city-wide lottery, which might have resulted in practically every child in Brighton and Hove having a long journey to school.

The experiment also made it clear that many people do not find lotteries fair. There is a perfectly good case for lotteries not being seen as fair because, first, they do not take account of the strength of preferences and, secondly, they do not make it possible to take account of individual circumstances. That is the crux of my point. The reality is that when you are faced with a problematic set of decisions, which school admissions are, either you can try to have automatic algorithmic rules or you are thrust back on decision-making, discretion and judgment. It is very tempting to feel that bureaucratic rules that you cannot get around, where there is no room for discretion, must be better and fairer. However, the experience of human beings is that all too often this is not the case. You have to choose between the possibility that sometimes people will not exercise their judgment correctly and fairly and the certainty that if you have a system that does not allow you to take account of the unexpected, the problematic and individual circumstances, you will always have situations in which a decision is seen by those affected as unfair and unjustifiable. That is just the way life is, but it has tremendous implications for how we might respond at this point.

Schooling is becoming more and more important; more and more parents take seriously where they want their children to go, therefore the issue of oversubscribed schools will get more rather than less acute. There are good reasons for feeling that it will be easier for the educated and the privileged to deal with this. As I said, I argue that the answer is not more and more rules. In preparing for this debate, it was interesting to look at what the previous schools adjudicator said about the current situation. You get the impression that the whole thing is a catastrophe: at least half the schools in the country are breaking the code.

However, when you look at the details, you find two things. I have tremendous sympathy with one of the problems—and anybody here who is a school governor and lives with this calendar of policies and things that have to go up on the website will sympathise. A large number of problems are caused by schools that do not do what they are directed to do because they did not understand that they needed to do it. I do not mean putting up your admissions criteria—clearly, that is important. As an example, a school might have decided that it will just go on doing what the local authority did; the local authority decides to change it, the school does not have a meeting of governors at which it deliberates and decides, and therefore it has broken the code. That sounds so silly that one does not need to take it seriously, but it is important to understand that many violations of the code are of this sort.

However, there is also the very real complexity issue, which I will concentrate on for the last couple of minutes. The adjudicator points out that in many cases you have complex arrangements and over-subscription criteria that are difficult to understand. It is also the case that just about every sixth form out there is in contravention of the code. That is because once you get to that point, there are complex decisions to be made. It is not like admitting somebody to a completely standardised primary school curriculum: you have to make decisions, not just about the number of students in your school but whether or not you will have viable numbers. Do you end up with a set of students and end up abolishing certain key A-levels because you were not allowed to take any account of whether or not the students you accepted would create a viable group, which might be the only group in that city which was offering that A-level? In the current situation, unless you are a special school, like a mathematics school, you do not have any ability to balance out these very real dilemmas. I argue that when you have a code that everybody breaks, which is the case for the sixth forms, maybe the problem is the code, not the sixth forms. When everybody breaks something, maybe there is a real problem.

There have been a number of occasions in the past—for example, national vocational qualifications—when Governments have believed that you could create a set of rules so clear that anybody, trained expert or not, could come along and say, “Okay, this one has passed—that one has not; this one goes in this box—that one goes in that box”. The reality of experience in every case is that we cannot foresee all the circumstances that occur—we cannot foresee the future—therefore in any complex situation we have to allow some room, or some slack, for human discretion and judgment.

In conclusion, I hope that the Minister will do a great deal to support parents. However, I urge him in doing so to look at procedures, access to help and, above all, simplifying rather than further elaborating the current code and requirements.