Higher Education and Research Bill

Lord Lucas Excerpts

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

[Lord Lucas (Con)]

My Lords, so do I. I declare interests in that I publish books on American universities, am a member of the advisory council of the New College of Humanities and am a supporter of what I hope will turn out in the end to be a Catholic liberal arts university in London. Your Lordships will not therefore be surprised to know that I support the Bill and, in particular, am a fan of new entrants to higher education. None the less, I have listened with great interest to all that noble Lords have said, and I hope better to understand during Committee many of the points that have been raised. In particular, I hope we really manage to do something to improve the TEF, or to at least lay the foundation for its improvement. TEF means nothing at university level: it only means something to a student if it is applied at course level.

The idea of gold, silver and bronze is a ranking system for turkeys. It is deeply misconceived, and why the universities asked for it, I cannot begin to understand. I very much hope that we will overturn it. The point of data is to produce lots and then let people make up their own minds, given their own particular needs and context. That way, you have a lot more information around. How on earth can we think that we can reduce one of our great universities to the colour of an award? It really beggars belief that the universities have gone down that route.

My particular interests in the Bill centre on the provision of information. I would like the Government to have the right to communicate with every overseas student at every higher education institution. We ought, as a nation, to be developing a lifelong relationship of mutual support with people who have been to university here. We need to promote collaboration between universities on the presentation of British education overseas, and to enable us to focus on that, we need good information. We need better migration statistics. I would like us to legislate in the Bill to require the universities and government to collaborate in producing accurate immigration and emigration statistics for students, and I very much hope I will get the collaboration of the Opposition in pushing for that. I do not see why we should be content not to have information.

We also need information on university performance, a subject raised by my noble friend Lord Polak, who wants to know what is going on with anti-Semitism, and by the noble Baroness, Lady Rebuck, who wants to know what is happening to access funds. It is extraordinary to me that these research institutions do so little research into the effectiveness of the money they are spending on access—they certainly publish very little. I would really like to see that change. My particular interest is that we should take information on sexual harassment seriously. Having information and getting these things out into the open allow discussion, evolution and progress. There are a number of areas where we really need to open the university system up. Freedom of speech is one of them, although I exempt my noble friend Lord Patten from that, as he has been stalwart in its defence.

Most of all we need information for students. UCAS has been a horrible institution to deal with. It has kept its information to itself. It has guarded it and not let it out, and deliberately provided substandard information to students. All it publishes in terms of tariff is what universities say the tariff is. Independent schools know that of course that is not true. Yes, Imperial sticks to its tariff, but with other universities you can be two or three grades off and still be sure of getting in. That information is known to richer schools but not to ordinary schools, and means that our disadvantaged students are disadvantaged in the choices of university they make.

We have not had information on who attempts or indeed merely looks at going to university for a particular kind of course or degree but then backs away, which is essential to understanding how we can improve the interest the disadvantaged are taking in university as a whole and that women are taking in technology. We have not published information before on success rates or on the offers that universities make. Due to the monopoly system we have not allowed students to access other and better sources of information; it has only been UCAS’s interpretation of the information that has been permitted to them. This has to end. There are some good things in the Bill that have made progress in that direction but we need to go further. We need to ensure that all higher education institutions, particularly the private ones, provide the same level of information as the public ones, otherwise we will get commercial considerations fogging the scene.

We need some information on how tuition fees are spent. I know this is unpopular with universities; they have long regarded it as reasonable that they rob history students of £3,000 a year in order to give it to physics students. This must be out in the open. It should be a decision for potential historians to make if they wish to subsidise the scientists. If that is not tenable, which I do not think it would be, then we as a Government, and as a collection of institutions, must do something about it and get honest.

My final suggestion is that we should bring the Student Loans Company into the Bill. There are some things we can do to make it easier for the company to reclaim the debts of people who have gone to work overseas. I would also like it to be empowered—to be directed—to act as a channel of information between the Government and students who are paying off their loans, so we can get really good information on what is happening and information from people who have been to university about what they think their courses were like, which is the real measure of quality.