Higher Education and Research Bill

Debate between Lord Addington and Baroness Blackstone

Report: 1st sitting: House of Lords
Monday 6th March 2017 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Blackstone]

My Lords, I strongly support Amendment 2, tabled by the noble Baroness, Lady Garden of Frognal, and supported by my noble friend Lady Bakewell, whose salient arguments I endorse but will not repeat.

I turn to Amendment 87 in my name. At Second Reading, I mentioned how important it is to ensure that the Director of Fair Access and Participation has the independence and autonomy required to do the job effectively. Although various interventions have helped to improve the proportion of university entrants from disadvantaged groups, the gap is still far too great between them and their more advantaged peers. Eighteen year-olds from the most advantaged areas are more than two and a half times more likely to enter higher education than those from poor neighbourhoods. Put another way, fewer than one in five young people from lower income backgrounds go to university, compared with three in five from the most advantaged areas. Recent figures show that around 20% of people from low-income groups go to university, compared with 47% of all people aged between 17 and 30.

I appreciate that the Government have pledged to increase the proportion of students from disadvantaged backgrounds and are determined to improve social mobility. I do not just appreciate it; I congratulate the Government on taking this position. I know that the Minister for Higher Education is aware and is concerned about the fact that there is also a very uneven distribution of students from poor families across different universities. The most socially privileged students are nearly seven times more likely to go to universities with high entry requirements. Put another way, only 3% of disadvantaged young people go to the more selective one-third of universities, compared with 21% of those from the richest neighbourhoods. The gap is even higher in the 13 most selective universities. That is enough statistics. They mean that people from lower-income backgrounds are seriously underrepresented in the more selective universities which have the most prestige and provide the easiest routes into high-status and highly paid jobs. As long as this goes on, attempts to increase social mobility will be jeopardised.

The role of the Director of Fair Access, therefore, needs to be given as much strength as possible to achieve the changes needed. The director will be helped by new duties to publish applications, offers and acceptance and progression rates, broken down by ethnicity, disadvantage and gender. Greater transparency, leading to more information about the performance of HEIs, will be a great help, but alone it is not enough.

I can see the business case for incorporating the Office for Fair Access into what is currently called the new Office for Students—although we hope that name might change. It makes sense on efficiency grounds, but it diminishes the independence of the Director of Fair Access. In future, he or she will have to report through the head of the Office for Students, a body that universities will fund and which may therefore be less inclined to challenge HEIs generally, and powerful individual universities in particular, on issues of access. There is a risk then that he or she may be overruled on important issues relating to access. I understand that the Sutton Trust has had some assurances that this is not the intention. To be sure that this does not occur, however, a simple safeguard could be introduced by amending the Bill to require the Director of Fair Access and Participation to report annually to Parliament on the performance of the Office for Students. This would strengthen the role, maintaining both independence and accountability, so I hope the Minister, when he replies, will accept the amendment.

[Lord Addington (LD)]

My Lords, Amendments 94 and 98 in this group stand in my name. I have also put my name to the amendment of the noble Baroness, Lady O’Neill, which I agree with totally.

Of the two amendments in my name, Amendment 98 is probably the simplest to deal with. It is inspired by the fact that dyslexic students—these are just the example I use to justify this amendment—often have to go through two diagnostic assessments before they are put through to the assessment of support they get under the disabled students’ allowance. People say, “So what?”; I say, “£500 minimum charge, so what”. This is for something when you have already been diagnosed once with a lifelong condition. Apparently if you are dyslexic before the age of 16, you may, with this lifelong condition, be miraculously changed at the age of 18. I do not know why this first came in—probably because the condition was not very well understood X number of years ago—but it is there. It slows everything down, it is expensive and it probably benefits the person charging for the assessment and nobody else. The British Dyslexia Association, of which I am president, does some of this work and is prepared to forgo the charge.

I hope we will hear something that gets rid of it. Just in case there is any doubt, you go through a needs assessment when you go on this, so you have to do this twice if your parents have got round to having you checked in the first place. It is a second charge. The amendment is fairly straightforward. It is worded as it is because I am aware that it is not the case that the only absurdity on the planet is in my particular little corner of this world, so I made the amendment wide enough to get some redress there.

My second amendment is inspired by something with which I have already engaged in Committee on the Bill. We have changed the way the DSA operates and put more emphasis on universities covering some of the lower-intensity needs of those with disabilities. I have to say that the information that was not provided for the start of this year, when the new regime came in—that is, what the new regime was—has since been provided in the snappily titled Inclusive Teaching and Learning in Higher Education as a Route to Excellence. The document states clearly, over and over again, that universities have a duty in this field. The problem starts, however, when you get to what that duty actually means. There is no guidance in the document other than a statement that a few people do this fairly well. It mentions several institutions, Cambridge being one of them, but does not state exactly what they do; it merely states that they do something. I believe that about one and a half pages are devoted to the interactive and support programmes of the University of Cambridge. Therefore, there is a duty but no guidance on how to fulfil it.

I am sure that the Minister will tell us when he replies that many universities have quite good programmes, but not all of them do. The real problem starts when you go to a college which has a different regime for further education support for students with disabilities from its regime for higher education support for those who used to be covered by the DSA. If those bodies do not know what they are supposed to do, how are they supposed to do it?