Part-time and Continuing Education and the Open University

Lord Haskins Excerpts

Thursday 5th July 2018 Lords Chamber

[Lord Haskins (CB)]

My Lords, the noble Baroness, Lady Bakewell, has vividly and starkly analysed and shown the scale of the problem we are talking about today. I was chair of the council of the Open University for 10 years, between 2004 and 2014, when these changes began to emerge. The reality has come home to roost only in the last couple of years.

The first change was the introduction of student loans. As the noble Lord, Lord Forsyth, clearly said, that was a piece of financial engineering and chicanery by the Treasury, introduced by Gordon Brown and accelerated by George Osborne. It was a completely unnecessary and cynical piece of financial engineering. Secondly, we had the elimination of ELQs, which were not a huge issue in money terms but were huge symbolically. They were part of the values that the Open University stood for; never mind the financial side, they were a cornerstone of it. The third trend which I found strange was, on the one hand, the championing of the devolving of power—I championed it very much—away from Milton Keynes to the Celtic nations while at the same time, rather against my best interests, there was the increasing centralisation of power in England towards Milton Keynes. We have an English problem here because the trend in student numbers, awful as it is in the Celtic nations, is twice as bad in England. There is a lesson there to be learned.

There are two issues for the OU to consider. First, is the model of 50 years ago, modified as it has been as things have gone along, still up to date with today’s student requirements? Secondly, has centralisation in England gone too far? I suggest two possible initiatives for the OU to consider in getting out of this difficulty. One is collaboration with universities across the United Kingdom, locally and regionally, to develop a new form of distance learning. Those local universities have their feet on the ground and collaboration seems an interesting proposition, which would not cost much money. We have to remember that part-time education has virtually disappeared from the curriculum of most universities anyway, so it would revive that. The other is that I chair one of the local enterprise partnerships in the north of England, where the biggest problem we face is the lack of skills and training in non-academic jobs and circumstances. Could not the Open University model be adjusted to address that need in society, which is not academic, using the technology and the distance-learning skills the university has in an innovative way to deal with a local problem?

What should the Government do about all this? First, we welcome the post-18 review and we obviously consider that it must primarily review the impact of student loans on part-time education, because a loan to a 28 year-old is very different from a loan to an 18 year-old. Secondly, they should restore the priority of lifelong learning, which for 20 or 30 years had become a stronger and stronger issue in government. They should change that and put it back as a policy priority. Thirdly, they should consider incentives for employers to use the Open University more than they do. There has been a significant fall in the number of employers sponsoring students going to that university, which is a disgrace and a bad reflection on those businesses, which cannot see beyond the end of their noses. Lastly, the Government should pay far more than lip service to devolution in England and recognise that it makes huge economic and social sense in the way that we deliver economic development, health and education.