Higher Education (Transparency Condition and Financial Support) (England) Regulations 2018

Lord Lucas Excerpts

Tuesday 24th July 2018 Lords Chamber

In summary, the transparency condition and financial support regulations work together to enable the Office for Students to promote access, participation and student choice across all higher education. Together, they are part of the vital foundations for the new regulatory framework that will give the Office for Students the tools to deliver sector-wide reform and ensure that higher education delivers for every student. I beg to move that these regulations are approved.

[Lord Lucas (Con)]

My Lords, I very much welcome these regulations. For a long time since the introduction of the higher-level fees, there has been a large expenditure by universities on trying to widen access, but to my mind it has been carried out in a most disappointing manner. Universities are mostly research institutions that understand how research works, but a lot of these expenditures have not been accompanied by evaluation, by publication of what does and does not work or by any sharing of expertise between institutions so that this common enterprise can work better.

I hope that there are some but I have not seen any examples of universities working with other elements of government or the third sector to try to tackle the underlying problems. A lot of these problems are deep, as your Lordships’ committee on seaside communities is finding out. The principal reason that some of these communities do not send many people to university is not down to what the universities do or do not do; it is down to the problems inherent in those communities. The best way for universities to tackle this problem is by working with other agencies active in those communities to try to achieve something wider and more co-ordinated. I would love to see more examples of that.

I really hope that my noble friend can assure me that this decade of bad practice is coming to an end, that we will be able to see exactly how universities are spending this money, that the Government, through the OfS, will expect publication of evaluation, that they will expect collaboration, and that they will expect a sector-wide drive towards better performance with a lot of the collaboration that that requires. I think that everybody is aiming in the same direction in terms of what we want to achieve, and it is very unsatisfactory that such huge expenditures are not being used efficiently and effectively.

[Lord Adonis]

My Lords, I see that my noble friend Lord Watson has a Motion on the Order Paper. Does he intend to move it?