Technical and Further Education Bill

Lord Lucas Excerpts

Committee: 2nd sitting (Hansard): House of Lords
Monday 27th February 2017 Grand Committee

[Lord Hunt of Kings Heath (Lab)]

My Lords, at the heart of many of our debates so far there has been a desire to ensure that there is clear accountability for ensuring that at the end of the day we see the development of high-quality apprenticeships. Given the number of bodies involved and the complexity of the organisation and regulation of apprenticeships and technical education, I do not think there is any surprise that we see some ambiguity around this area. The question raised just now by the noble Baroness, Lady Garden, about the definition of an apprenticeship and how to change it showed some of the complexities that we are struggling with.

The Minister very kindly sent us a chart showing where current responsibilities lie. In summary, they seem to be as follows. The Education Funding Agency funds provision for pre-19 students. The Skills Funding Agency funds provision for students over 19, plus apprenticeships, and operates the apprenticeship service. Ofqual regulates the qualification and awarding bodies, including certain apprenticeships. The Institute for Apprenticeships determines the scope of technical education, sets the criteria and awards licences for the delivery of technical education qualifications; it approves and reviews standards and ensures they are upheld through contractual arrangements. Then there is Ofsted, which inspects the quality of training for level 2 and 3 apprenticeships. The information from the Minister is that HEFCE’s role in relation to levels 4 and 5 is still to be determined.

On any reading, that is a pretty complex picture. Is any one of those organisations responsible, in the end, for high-quality apprenticeships? Which of those bodies does the Minister hold ultimately accountable? For instance, which would be called in by the Education Select Committee, or, as I suspect, would they all be because no one is actually going to take ultimate responsibility?

What about the actions of employers? We know that some apprenticeships fail because of a lack of commitment from employers. My noble friend Lady Cohen described this very eloquently on our first day in Committee. What enforcement powers can be taken against employers who, for instance, undermine the apprenticeship schemes which their employees are on, for one reason or another? Ultimately, if the institute is the nearest we have got to an oversight body, does it have enough clout to ensure that it can influence all the other agencies involved? If the answer to the question is Ministers, what mechanisms do they have to give strategic direction and oversight? My noble friend doubted whether the noble Lord liked to bang heads together. I assume he does like to, but can he and how is it going to be done?

The amendment is a modest but, I hope, useful contribution to this. I have borrowed the concept from health legislation, where we are used to having a number of national bodies—either quangos, quasi-independent or to a certain extent independent—which are under a statutory duty to co-operate with each other. It might be useful to have a similar concept in relation to apprenticeships and technical education, given the diffusion of responsibility among many different organisations. The amendment is modest, but behind it lies the plea that, in the end, there is some organisation that can clearly be held to account for the quality of apprenticeships in future. At the moment, I have some doubts as to whether we can actually do that. I beg to move.

[Lord Lucas (Con)]

My Lords, I have a couple of questions to add to those of the noble Lord, Lord Hunt. It is important that a single organisation should keep a list of approved qualifications. At present, it is unclear whether this is going to be IFATE or Ofqual. I hope the Committee can have an answer to that. Secondly, I am unclear how far IFATE’s remit goes into the world of commercial qualifications: the sort of things where a commercial training provider will persuade an industry that this is a particular bit of training they should have for their staff; it has some sort of qualification name attached to it but is completely outside the government-funded system. Will IFATE have any influence in this area, or is it entirely outside its remit?

[Lord Young of Norwood Green]

My Lords, I will focus on just one area because, as I understand it, the various bodies set out in the amendment each have a different role. When we debated this on the first day in Committee, the Minister told us that the body that was going to look at the quality of apprenticeships was Ofsted and that it was going to work on a risk-based approach. I told him that I understood the approach but would welcome some clarification of how it is going to apply. He said that he would get back to us on that. As far as I am concerned, there are two things here. I support the thrust of the amendment, in that we need to be clear about the roles and responsibilities, but my overall concern is ensuring that we deliver quality apprenticeships so that the brand has a good reputation among teachers, potential apprentices and parents. If the Minister has replied to this point, I have not yet seen it. Is he in a position to tell us how this risk-based approach will apply to apprenticeships?

Given that we are looking to drive up the number of SMEs involved, the risk will not be with the larger organisations with well-established reputations, such as Rolls-Royce, BT, British Aerospace and a whole host of others that have been mentioned before. We know that people who go into those organisations will get a quality apprenticeship. That is not the problem. The problem will be in small and medium-sized concerns. Given that the success of this enterprise in driving up significantly the number of apprenticeships will depend on ensuring that we embrace more of those organisations in providing apprenticeships, a lot more than currently do, this is not an insignificant issue.

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Moved by

[Lord Lucas]

17: Schedule 1, page 23, line 1, after “outcomes” insert “, including at least one recognised technical qualification,”

[Lord Lucas]

My Lords, I shall also speak to the other amendments in this group. I remind the Committee that I am associated with City & Guilds, which obviously has an interest in what happens under this part of the Bill. I will leave remarks on intellectual property, as far as I can, to the next group, which seems to focus on that subject.

As part of the Sainsbury review, we have a proposal that each of the 15 routes that it suggests should have a single awarding body allocated to it and that those awarding bodies should be subject to review every seven years. The Department for Education took a long time thinking about this structure in regard to GCSEs and decided against. It decided to keep the current three and a half, as it were, awarding bodies available for every subject and I think it did that for a very good reason. A single awarding body is a single point of failure. If it goes wrong, we are stuck.

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[Baroness Wolf of Dulwich]

My Lords, I must rise to defend the position of the Sainsbury review, as I was a member of it and signed up to it, after a great deal of debate. No one in the group moved easily to the position where we recommended a single qualification for the college-based route—not, I should add, for all apprenticeships. Nothing in the Sainsbury review says that employers do not have a choice at that level. We did so for historical reasons and for comparative reasons. Historically, the model described by the noble Baroness served us quite well, but it is pretty much unique. Other countries have a single set of national qualifications. They do not have competing awarding bodies.

Historically, the Government set out consciously to destroy any near-monopoly in the vocational area. Back in the 1960s and 1970s, although there was no formal monopoly for City & Guilds, for example, none the less, construction awards were City & Guilds. If you wanted to train as a nursery nurse, you did NNEB. These were extremely well-known and well-respected qualifications. Since then, we have had repeated attempts to break that situation open and instil standardisation via standards. The result has unfortunately been in many cases a clear race to the bottom and, worse, the disappearance of any qualification which is clearly recognised and therefore has a brand and market value. This was, in a way, a slightly sadder but wiser recommendation.

When I wrote the vocational education review for 14 to 18 year-olds, I did not recommend a single awarding body. I hoped at that point that a regime within the Department for Education, which had clear standards for a qualification passing muster, would lead to a serious improvement in the quality of the vocational awards and the assessment, and the emergence of recognised market leaders. It really depresses me that that did not happen. We have a real problem at the moment: the old recognition has gone and the modified regime, which was brought in in the middle, does not seem to have done the trick. We have a gigantic number of qualifications on the books, many of them taken by tiny numbers of people, with no clear recognition at all. This area is by necessity very different from GCSE, where the Government really do not give awarding bodies much freedom any more. The degree of freedom which you have in the key areas of English or maths is pretty notional. The decision not to go ahead with the single awarding body was not because of a belief that we should not have one but because of Ofqual’s well-justified conclusion that it would not merely disorient the whole system but so destabilise it that we might have a national disaster.

There is a real issue in how the institute does its licensing, but it is not true that a body which holds a licence does so forever. Clearly, nothing will prevent the institute varying its regime in future years. However, I feel we are now in a situation where if we do not make a clear attempt to create a recognised, national qualification for each of these routes, people will not take them. They will feel that everybody knows what an A-level or a BTEC is, but we still have 15 of these things and do not know what any of them mean. So for once, unusually, I disagree with the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, and the noble Baroness, Lady Garden. The Sainsbury review was right to feel that a single licence for these classroom-based routes is what we have to do now, in 2017.

[Lord Lucas]

Yes, it is perfectly possible to do that but does the noble Baroness not think that we need a decent level of staff in IFATE in the middle of that? If she is saying that it will be the repository of this qualification and will maintain quality, integrity and innovation down through the years, can that be done on two and a half people, who seem to be all that are left to spare?

[Baroness Wolf of Dulwich]

I hope that with the licensing situation there will be a chunk of time when it is worth investing. There are issues relating to the licensing system, which we will get to later in the Committee, but we are not asking the institute to run the qualification. We are saying that there should be a licensed awarding body but that if the situation is not restored to where there is one clear, recognised qualification for a route, the qualification will have no brand recognition. The Government also tried repeatedly to kill off BTECs and they failed, because people value and need something that is known. In the current situation, we have created something of a desert with a few rather feeble weeds.

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[Baroness Buscombe]

I am sorry that the noble Lord seems to be taking quite a negative approach to this. As I said earlier, this Bill is for primary legislation to set a framework. Of course, there may be a situation where Ministers may have to have oversight, but the reality is that we want this to work as charged by the Sainsbury review. We are responding to a situation where we want to turn around something that has clearly not worked, and has clearly not been successful or provided the best outcomes for young people going into the world of work. We are trying to change that.

All I can say at this point is that we are happy to write to noble Lords to explain in more detail what we are trying to achieve through this process. As I said earlier, the legislation will not tie the hands of the institute. Flexibility and quality are key words in how this will develop.

[Lord Lucas]

My Lords, I am very grateful to my noble friend for her lengthy explanation. The main thing I would like to ask her is that, between Committee and Report, we have the chance to sit down and discuss this, as the noble Lord, Lord Hunt, says, with the people who are going to deliver this, as far as we can find them, so that we can get a real understanding of how this process is going to work.

I am delighted that my noble friend uses the word “flexibility”, but I cannot see how a seven-year provider four years into a contract is going to react when faced with an industry which says that it wants things changed because the technology or the requirements have moved on. The provider is going to ask, “How am I going to do this? It takes two years to change things and then I have a year to get my money back on this. What’s the game?”. I cannot see why, within the structure the Minister has described, two or three awarding organisations would be a problem; I can see why a single awarding organisation is a very deep problem in terms of the power transfer from government to the organisations.

I do not think that anybody who has spoken is opposed to the Government trying to make things better. We all have a sense of what is wrong with the current system, but we do not see that what is proposed answers that. That is not because the structure cannot answer it but because, to do the things that is asked of it, IFATE has to be a much stronger organisation. Alternatively, we need an arrangement, as we have with GCSEs, where below IFATE there is a layer or organisations that have a long-term commitment to and belief in improving things—they may be competing with each other but, essentially, they will work in partnership with IFATE and should expect to be there for the long term. That is better than a circulating body of people who are there and not there on a seven-year cycle, given that education cycles are so much longer. We would like to get an understanding of that and I very much hope my noble friend may be able to organise a meeting for us.

[Baroness Buscombe]

I am very happy to say that a meeting on the basis my noble friend suggests would be welcome between now and Report.

[Lord Lucas]

I am very grateful for that, and I am sure that other Members of the Committee would be delighted to come. I do not think there is any virtue then in continuing my peroration. I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.

Amendment 17 withdrawn.

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Amendment 24 is for clarification. As we have touched on already, qualifications currently feature in the Ofqual regulated qualifications framework. Will this list be separate and, if not, how will it relate to that framework? There are currently around 1,800 qualifications at levels 4 and 5 on Ofqual’s register of regulated qualifications. If the list proposed in Section A2HA is a replacement, there ought to be clear transitional arrangements in place now. If this list is parallel to the RQF, will this not add an additional level of complexity, rather than simplifying the system? Perhaps the Minister can clarify government thinking on this too.

[Lord Lucas]

My Lords, most of what I want to say has been said very well by the noble Baroness, Lady Garden. I have a couple of questions to add. First, some of the existing awarding organisations have quite substantial overseas businesses in the qualifications that they currently run. Is it the Government’s intention that these should be destroyed? I cannot see how they could be continued under the proposed IP arrangements. Secondly, how do the Government propose to deal with the incorporation into their regulated qualifications of qualifications whose IP they cannot hope to own, such as a CompTIA or Cisco qualification? In other words, if an apprenticeship can have four or five of these qualifications stuck in it like a currant bun—which is very much what employers want—presumably no transfer of intellectual property is involved. If this is the case for CompTIA, why should it not be the case for any existing awarding organisation?

[Baroness Whitaker (Lab)]

I remind noble Lords of my fellowship of the Working Men’s College. I support Amendment 20, not only for all the reasons so eloquently expressed by my noble friend but because it also offers a much more solid opportunity for young people from the Gypsy and Traveller communities to enter apprenticeships and to gain qualifications. These people have often dropped out of secondary school. A high proportion do so, for a variety of reasons. High among them are bullying and discrimination, and there is also a degree of alienation. However, these young people want to earn a living. They live in a work culture, an entrepreneurial one even. Their traditional trades—tarmacking, tree-lopping and scrap metal dealing—now need a high enough standard of literacy and numeracy to understand quite a lot of documentation, such as safety regulations and all sorts of papers. They do not often acquire these at school, so the implementation of this worthwhile amendment could result in many more such young people gaining a credential and raising their earning potential, so allowing them to join a society which, in the past, has tended not to be sympathetic.

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[Lord Lucas]

My Lords, I am feeling very disoriented here. A Conservative Government are arguing for nationalisation and against competition while I am arguing for more civil servants. This is not where I expected to be. My noble friend did not answer my question about external qualifications, such as Cisco or CompTIA, being embedded within apprenticeships or FE qualifications. Am I right in assuming that the Government are quite content under those circumstances to have no copyright whatever over those qualifications?

[Baroness Buscombe]

Yes, that is right. It would be absolutely outside the scope of the Bill.

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[Lord Watson of Invergowrie]

My Lords, I have added my name to this amendment, and the Labour Benches support the remarks made by the noble Baroness, Lady Garden of Frognal. She has a great deal of experience in the field of technical qualifications, so I have little meaningful to add. In earlier debates on the Bill, I have said that I hope to see a situation develop which leads to a small and relatively focused group of technical education qualifications. GCSEs and A-levels are instantly and universally recognised and accepted; I want to see something similar for technical education certificates. The current plethora of qualifications means that too few are understood, far less valued, and that diminishes the hard work that young people put into gaining them. How dispiriting it must be to emerge successfully from the end-point assessment only to find that the qualification gained is not widely recognised or transferrable to other employers.

Allowing the use of the DfE logo and consistent wording would standardise the technical education certificates issued, make it clear that they are overseen by the Department for Education and thus have a value transferrable throughout England. That measure is long overdue.

[Lord Lucas]

My Lords, I will speak to Amendment 32. I am trying to follow up on Second Reading and make a couple of suggestions to the Government which I hope are helpful.

First, if they have got this system of issuing certificates, they should make sure that, at the same time, they get the ability to communicate with apprentices. If I were in government, I would use this as a means of making sure that quality was being delivered, by sending questionnaires out to apprentices as a means of improving the quality of apprenticeships by asking what needed to be done better, particularly by asking them a couple of years after their apprenticeship what, with the benefit of experience, might have been improved. I would also use it as a way of getting information with which to celebrate the schools that apprentices went to. Schools pay far too little attention to the apprentices they have educated, mostly because they do not know anything about them. With university it is there; it is easy; it happens immediately. Apprenticeship information is not gathered in the same way; it is not celebrated by schools or made available to them. There are lots of things that the Government could do on the back of having the ability to communicate and I encourage them to give themselves that.

Secondly—I am echoing what is being said in Amendment 31—let us give these young people something really worth having, something to which they can put their name. The point of GCSEs and A-levels is that they are recognised. If we are taking away the plethora of sometimes well-valued names that attach themselves to technical qualifications, let us create a name and be able to give young people some letters to put after their name, such as BA—I do not actually know what these letters should be, but they should be something that say that the young person has done this and have got the right to this. I am not a wordsmith to create this, but once they are not an apprentice they are nothing—they are a former apprentice; it is like being a former priest, something suspicious. We should give them something that celebrates what they have achieved, in the same way that we do for people who have followed the academic path.

[Baroness Cohen of Pimlico]

My Lords, I support both amendments. I add—and would venture to do so only in Committee—a private loop around the question of naming and how apprentices get to be made more important. On further consideration, I do not like the title of the Bill: “Technical Education” does not seem to cover it. I have no idea how this could be done, but I wonder whether we could consider changing the name of the Bill to the “Professional and Technical Education Bill”. Among the groups named in the Bill that will be considered are lawyers, accountants and other variants. We tend to refer to ourselves as professionals. It would cheer up apprentices in those fields no end to know that they were recognised as professionals. In fact it would cheer up apprentices generally if it was not just about a technical education, but about a professional one, indicating that they will be a professional in their field. I am thinking also of some of the nursing and auxiliary qualifications that would sound a lot better if they were named as the professional qualifications that in fact they are.

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[Lord Nash]

My Lords, these government amendments will allow the Secretary of State to make sure that the data-sharing gateway in new Section 40AA remains fit for purpose through regulations. The regulations can include persons to whom the institute can disclose information or who can disclose information to the institute, and the functions about which the information may be disclosed. New Section 40AA will establish data-sharing gateways between the institute and Ofsted, Ofqual, the Office for Students or any other person set out in the regulations. There is already a separate provision for the institute to share information in relation to its own functions.

The bodies with which the institute is likely to need to co-operate and share information to do its job effectively are expected to change over time. That is particularly important given the reforms in higher and technical education. For example, the Quality Assurance Agency will not be named specifically in legislation and the quality arrangements in that area may change over time. It will be important to ensure that the institute can work effectively with whatever body is designated in that case, as well as any other bodies which take on roles in relation to education and training. All the disclosures under the gateways take precedence over any non-statutory restrictions, but they would be subject to all the important safeguards in the Data Protection Act 1998.

I reassure noble Lords that I am, however, absolutely mindful of the need to ensure full parliamentary scrutiny each time the Section 40AA power is used. Although not common in relation to similar regulations, where the negative procedure will be used, it is proposed that these regulations will be subject to the affirmative procedure. In view of this, I hope that noble Lords will accept this amendment.

[Lord Lucas]

Will the DfE be able to access this data, for instance to try to understand what history at school leads to what sort of performance in technical qualifications and apprenticeships?

[Lord Watson of Invergowrie]

My Lords, I welcome these amendments and want to say just a brief word about them, and in particular about Amendment 33.

On Report in another place Labour raised the issue of introducing the Quality Assurance Agency as a body to whom the institute can communicate information. The Minister, Mr Halfon, resisted at that time, saying that it depended on developments in the Higher Education and Research Bill. That Bill is still under way, but things have clearly moved on and the Minister has had second thoughts because we are pleased to hear that the Government now want to empower the institute to exchange information with all bodies with which it might need to do business, apparently without worrying about data protection legislation.

I would like one point of clarification on that. The amendment to Schedule 1 refers to “a relevant person” —we understand that a “person” is an organisation—and lists Ofqual, the OfS and Ofsted and then “a prescribed person”. The Quality Assurance Agency would be a prescribed person. When the Minister replies, will he specify the difference between somebody who is “relevant” and somebody who is “prescribed”? Presumably a prescribed person is not irrelevant but is not relevant.

The Minister and his colleagues are adopting the Opposition’s wider view of the role of the institute. Will he say which persons or bodies he and his colleagues have in mind to add, apart from the QAA, to which he referred? An obvious one is local government which can provide a bridge between school education and the world of work. Local government still retains various statutory duties for 16 to 18 year-olds, including duties under the Education Act 1996 in respect of ensuring education and training for persons over compulsory school age and of encouraging employers to participate in the provision of education and training for young people. The Minister may be aware that local authorities have duties in respect of young people with special educational needs and disabilities for whom the local authority maintains an education, health and care plan and for care leavers up to the age of 25. I should have said the Minister will be aware; it is a bit unfair to say he may be.

I also note that government Amendments 48 to 54, which we shall consider on Wednesday, make the local authority director of children’s services a person who must be informed about the insolvency of an FE college because, according to the Government’s explanation, such colleges will be educating care leavers, and the local authority needs to know to ensure that the local authority–appointed personal advisers to the care leavers know of the insolvency.

There are numerous reasons for local government to be involved. Perhaps the Minister will make a statement—I will be perfectly happy for it to be on Wednesday—about the anticipated roles of the local authority and the institute and how they will interact.

Technical and Further Education Bill

Lord Lucas Excerpts

Committee: 1st sitting (Hansard): House of Lords
Wednesday 22nd February 2017 Grand Committee

[Lord Lucas (Con)]

My Lords, I am grateful to my noble friend for that answer, but could he enlarge on what he said about how parents can have the confidence to encourage their child to do an apprenticeship? As I understand it, the IFATE is the body that will say whether an apprenticeship has been set up right. I would be grateful for my noble friend’s thoughts on how many such apprenticeships it has to cover, how often it will review them and what staff it intends to allocate to that job. I will come back to this frequently, because I am astonished that the IFATE thinks that it can do its work with 80 people.

Secondly, am I right in thinking that the IFATE also looks at the design of delivery—the whole process by which an apprenticeship will be delivered? Over how many instances of that does it think it will have oversight and what resources does it intend to devote to it? What burden of work does the IFATE think it has in this area and with what regularity does it expect to carry out its reviews?

Perhaps my noble friend could also enlarge on what he said about Ofsted. Ofsted is a pretty variable visitor to schools. To some it will come every six months and to others it will come every 16 years. Given that we are in a pretty unmapped part of the world, I hope that the Government are budgeting for fairly frequent Ofsted inspections to enable the reputation of this area to grow quickly. I would be grateful if my noble friend could tell me what Ofsted is planning in terms of the number of visits that it intends to make a year and the average frequency with which it expects to visit providers.

[Lord Nash]

I will write to my noble friend about that.

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[Baroness Morris of Yardley]

My Lords, I support the amendments in this group, particularly Amendment 11, to which I have added my name. I have some concerns about Amendment 61 in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Storey, which I will mention. I do not want to go over the arguments again except to add weight of numbers to the strength of the arguments we have heard from other Members today. I do not disagree with anything that has been said, I just want to make two or three points which perhaps have not been made or have not been made frequently enough. I hope I will not speak for long.

First, I hope the Minister will be really clear about when this careers strategy is about to appear. We have been promised it for a very long time and I think I saw something by his colleague who leads in the department for this piece of legislation about it coming later in the year. Given that it is about two years since a careers strategy was promised, I am not sure why a Bill such as this, which will fail unless there is good-quality careers education, is coming so far in advance of the careers education strategy. They should go hand in hand. We would not be having this debate if we had the careers education strategy. I think a lot of these amendments have been tabled in sheer frustration. We almost panic because we know it is such a weak area of our system and we are about to pass the Bill with no effective careers education system. We need to know when the strategy will arrive and we need to understand why it has been delayed. If there is a problem, we need to know about it. I worry about that.

Secondly, I agree with the information bit but that in itself is not careers education. There are two parts to this. We need the information but then we need to make the decision. As a young person—or even an older person—just having information is not sufficient. The skill of making the right decision is far more complicated. You can let as many people into the school to give information about as wide a range of jobs as you can, but when they leave at the end of the day, it is the teacher who is there with the young person when the decision is made. That is a very important other part of this situation. Information by itself will not necessarily change the young person’s mind—it might but it might not.

There are three big influences on the child in making the decision: their parents, their friends and their teachers. The strategy must encompass and reflect that. We cannot squeeze teachers out of careers education. We can bring people with a wide range of knowledge and experience into the classroom, but teachers will have an important impact on the decisions reached because they are the pastoral carers and they spend an awful lot of time with young people. We have been critical of teachers, and rightly so, but we need a careers strategy that supports them in the job they are being asked to do. We do not want to give them the impression that we want them out of this business. They have an important role to play in supporting young people to make the right, effective and appropriate decision.

Thirdly, we are moaning about schools—I do not disagree with a word my noble friend said; he made this point brilliantly—but the incentives the Government have put into the system are causing the problems. What do we do? We moan at the teachers. We are complaining about the schools responding in an entirely predictable and understandable way to the incentives that we have put into the system—including me in my time. The answer to that is to change the incentives, but we want to leave the incentives in place and change the behaviour. That will not work. Where is the discussion about changing the incentives because that is the surest way of changing behaviour? I agree absolutely with the noble Lord, Lord Baker, that the UTCs are a force for good. They had a difficult birth and baptism but they are still a major player in the field. In a way, they encapsulate the problems of the incentives in the system. Their very existence is threatened because we have the wrong incentives, and I say that collectively of politics and Parliament. The case he has made about having access to young people is strong, but other things need to be done as well.

My only concern about Amendment 61 is that it is too easy to say, “Leave it to Ofsted. It cannot be a good school unless it has good careers education provision”. We always say that, and then every 10 years we have to prune what we ask Ofsted to inspect. We pile so much on to Ofsted. With every new initiative that is introduced we say, “Let’s get Ofsted to inspect it”. That is how the relationship between schools and Ofsted breaks down; the inspectors are always seen as the bearer of the big stick. I want to turn the amendment the other way around. We are saying that if a school does not have good careers education, it will go into “requires improvement” or “special measures” because those are the only two categories left. There are implications in that for a college that we ought to be aware of if Ofsted is to be used as the lever in this. It is a bit mean, or premature, to put a college into the “requires improvement” or “special measures” category because it has not got right a plank of policy that we have not got right either. It behoves us to get our bit right before we say to any educational provider, “If you don’t get this right”—despite the fact that we have not—“you will go into ‘requires improvement’ or ‘special measures’ and the consequences will be big”.

I say to the Minister that we would not be having this conversation if we had more information about the Government’s plans for the careers strategy. It is a big and dangerous hole at the moment and therefore I strongly support the amendments, with the caveat about Amendment 61.

[Lord Lucas]

My Lords, the incentive I would like to see is schools being allowed to take credit for the performance of the children they let go into technical education. If a child might get only Ds in history and English but they are good for an A* in BTEC business, and the school can get credit for that, the school’s interests will align with the child. It would also be a good thing for the performance tables. We have superb data because it is easy enough to collect them, but why should a school be penalised for a kid who arrives in the year before GCSEs, having had a dreadful education beforehand? That is not fair; nor is it fair that a school which has really looked after a child and brought them on to the point where they have the get up and go to attend a UTC then gets no credit for it. If a school feels that the best interests of the child will align with the way it is going to appear in the tables, there is a real hope for making progress in this area. We should be doing this anyway to ensure equity between schools, so I hope that this is a direction we might consider going in.

I like the amendment about a technical version of UCAS, which is immensely helpful to schools. Everything is in one place and it would all look and feel the same. You know how it works and what is required and it becomes easy to provide support and advice for the children using it.

Apprenticeships are a great challenge. Companies have a horrible habit of not admitting they have apprenticeship places until about two weeks before they want people to apply. They suddenly appear, enough people apply, and they disappear again. This is not the way in which a school can work or how young people should be asked to work. We have to discipline companies to make it clear in good time that they are open to apprenticeships so that people who are interested can see what is on offer year round and put their names down. I know that it will never be a regular cycle such as UCAS, but we need to discipline the system so that it works in the interests of children, and something like UCAS would help. A UCAS system would also provide a place to find all the information. If someone is looking for an apprenticeship they might not cotton on to who the education provider is, who to go to, which Ofsted report applies, where to look to find the outcomes, and other data that will tell them whether a particular apprenticeship is worth while. Something like UCAS would draw all that together. I would not actually use UCAS. It is a horrible institution that believes in making as much money as possible from the students passing through its system and it is run in the interests of universities rather than kids. But as a concept it is great, and we really ought to see whether we can do something along those lines.

It is high time that Amendment 11 was brought in. We all know how badly schools can behave. The noble Baroness, Lady Morris of Yardley, says that it is a matter of incentives as well. Let us have a structure which provides the stick and the carrot—this is the stick. Let us have a system where schools know that they are expected to do things. I presume that access means physical access. It cannot just be, “Well, we’ll pass your emails on”. Clearly the access will be moderated by the school and the teacher will sit down with the kid afterwards and tell them where they need to be really careful about such and such. However, at least it is progress in the right direction.

I hope that we might look at expanding subsection (3). There are some really important intermediary organisations which perform a function in this area. To name just one—Women in Construction. It performs a specialist job and looks after a particular subset of pupils, and it is doing that in a co-ordinated way, which makes it much better than your average local FE college, let alone a building company that happens to have some apprentices. Giving access to some of these collaborative organisations is a very useful supplement to the direct education and apprenticeship providers.

Turning to the carrot element again, there are other ways of doing this, and that is what my Amendment 34A seeks to achieve. It would allow money to flow to schools and organisations and would open up in a positive way the pipeline between what is going on in the creation of technical opportunity and the kids in schools.

There is a lot beyond what appears in Amendment 1l and schools are doing much that is positive. They invite people in to talk, and make arrangements for internships and work experience placements for their children. A lot of organisations are helping, but it is an immense burden on a school at a time when we are facing something like an 8% cash reduction for schools over the next three years. It is a hell of a thing to ask a school to add to its functions without in any way adding to its budget.

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[Lord Baker of Dorking]

My Lords, I find these amendments very interesting because they pose the question of what sort of beast we are creating in the Institute for Apprenticeships. The points made by the noble Baroness, Lady Garden, exactly address that. In the Institute for Apprenticeships we have created a body with clear functions. It has to sort out shoddy apprenticeships and try to bring some sense to the maze of technical qualifications. They are very important jobs, but they are essentially administrative, functional jobs. Surely the Institute for Apprenticeships will not be spending government money in the future; it will be spending money provided by industry and commerce. Therefore, the Government should really take a back seat from then on. They should be concentrating on what they are responsible for—the skills gap. They have to devise policies that close the skills gap. The improved apprenticeship system will do a great deal towards that, but it cannot do it alone. Closing the skills gap also needs major reforms in further education colleges to improve their effectiveness. If they had been as good as they think they are, we would not have as big a skills gap as we do at the moment.

The Government’s other responsibility is to try to ensure how our education system can improve technical education, which in fact it is destroying in schools at the moment. Those are policy matters and the main policy of the Government in this regard is what they can do to close the skills gap.

Where does that leave the Institute for Apprenticeships? It leaves it as a much more independent body. It is not spending government money. The question that the Government should be asking the Institute for Apprenticeships is: what contribution are you making to closing the skills gap? They should not therefore interfere with the institute apart from that, in my opinion. The eight directors appointed so far are quite a feisty lot of independent people. The institute should become the main policy area for apprenticeships and should do the sort of things indicated in the Liberal amendment.

This is a very different body, I suspect, from the one the Government think they are setting up. They still want to keep their sticky fingers on the Institute for Apprenticeships even though they are not providing the money. The money is being provided by industry and commerce—by business. The steering wheel should be taken away from them, and the Institute for Apprenticeships should become an important body, reviewing each year whether the whole apprenticeship system is right. It should decide whether apprenticeships should start at 14, not the Government—which I happen to support. It should decide about approving new providers, the terms for which are set out in Clause 6, and I am sure it would do it in a very professional way.

This is quite an interesting group of amendments, and I look forward to the Minister’s reply. This is an area that should slip away from immediate government control because the Government are not putting up the money.

[Lord Lucas]

My Lords, I support what my noble friend has said. The Government are creating a very powerful body. It will own the intellectual property in all the technical qualifications for the routes described in the Bill. There will be no other institution with any long-term interest in evolving or maintaining those qualifications or in developing a name and a reputation that parents and others can rely on. Below the Institute for Apprenticeships and Technical Education, we have a series of short-term contracts. City & Guilds—I sit on its council, which everyone knows is nothing, but at least indicates affection—will disappear at this level. There will be no City & Guilds qualifications; they will become qualifications of the institute for apprenticeships. City & Guilds, being a charity, may bid for a seven-year contract to be an awarding organisation or to look after one or two of the routes, but it will not be awarding City & Guilds qualifications, rather it will just provide a function for the institute.

We are creating something much closer to the German model. We are losing what remains of the lodestars that the British Computer Society, City & Guilds and others have been providing in terms of the name and quality of their qualifications and replacing them with a new structure. This structure needs to be more powerful and conscious of its role than it is described as being in the Bill. I would like to see the Government follow the logic of what they have produced in the Bill and create a creature which is capable of the long-term responsibilities being placed upon it. It may be that the Government need to acquire City & Guilds, which is after all a quasi-government organisation anyway. Perhaps they need to take it on board to provide the strength, history, continuity and the people needed to run the sort of thing that is being set up in the Bill, or at least to provide the engine for it. I do not see how dispensing with all that the good awarding bodies have created and providing a structure which does not have the power to do what is necessary is a safe way of proceeding with a very important part of our education system.

[Lord Nash]

My Lords, I am grateful to the noble Lords, Lord Watson and Lord Hunt, and the noble Baroness, Lady Garden, for the four amendments in this group. They address important issues relating to the Institute for Apprenticeships and Technical Education and, in particular, what functions it will have. I will address my remarks only to these four amendments and will start by responding to Amendment 6. Ensuring that new further education institutions provide high-quality provision is of course of the utmost importance. Through the area reviews process for the further education sector, we are also putting the sector on a secure financial footing by ensuring that the provider base matches student demand.

However, the institute is to be established with a very specific remit in relation to the quality of reformed apprenticeships: to set the quality criteria for the development of apprenticeship standards and assessment plans; to approve or reject proposed standards or plans and review them periodically, as appropriate; and to ensure that all end-point assessments are quality assured, including the potential to quality assure them itself. It will also advise the Government on the maximum level of government funding available for each individual apprenticeship standard. And, of course, the proposals in this Bill seek to extend its functions to technical education qualifications and related matters. It has no role at all, and is not expected to have a role, in relation to the authorisation of new further education institutions, even those that will deliver technical education qualifications in the future. It is therefore not appropriate to make this amendment to the Bill in the light of the expected remit of the institute.

I turn to Amendment 8, for which I am grateful to the noble Baroness, Lady Garden, and I wish her a happy birthday.

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[Baroness Garden of Frognal]

The amendment is in my name and that of my noble friend Lord Storey. I have previously raised concerns about the limitations of the word “technical” in the Bill. The long-standing term “vocational”, which was inclusive of all trades, crafts and professions that involved skills and practical aptitudes, has apparently fallen out of favour and “technical” has been deemed to carry more status. However, stonemasons, florists, film-makers, nurses, care workers and caterers do not see themselves as primarily technical operatives.

I worked for City & Guilds for 20 years. In my day, we did not think of it as a quasi-governmental organisation but rather as a long-standing, highly respected, royal chartered, charitable educational organisation. But there we are. I hope that times have not changed too much. In my day there were two main strands of vocational qualification—technical and craft. Then there were personal services, which was another important skill area, in which people skills were of paramount importance.

At Second Reading, the Minister, in reply to my question about whether craft, creative and service skills were intended to be covered by technical education, said:

“The answer is that they are”.—[Official Report, 1/2/17; col. 1261.]


However, the Bill does not say that. It is surely only in an Alice in Wonderland world, or perhaps even under the new American regime, that words mean what I say they mean. I checked the dictionary—at my age, one has to do that sort of thing—and found that the prime definition of technical is,

“pertaining to the mechanical arts and applied sciences”.

It was some comfort to find a secondary definition, which was,

“appropriate to a particular art, science, profession or occupation”.

That is better but not what is widely understood by “technical”.

For everyday purposes, the Bill should not be marginalising all those whose practical, work-based achievements are in craft, personal services or creative fields. The wording in my amendment may need some changes but the gist is that “technical” does not cover the myriad of work-based achievements. It needs expanding to be more inclusive if the new institute is really to be seen as a champion for all types of skill and practical achievement.

Rather than go through the whole Bill expanding “technical” each time it is mentioned, I propose that at the outset we explain that non-technical work skills will also come within the remit of the Bill. I hope that the Minister will see that this makes sense and be prepared to accept this modest and, I hope, helpful amendment. I beg to move.

[Lord Lucas]

My Lords, there is virtue in encompassing all this sort of education within one structure. I do not see the point in excluding bits because, presumably, they are felt to fall below the status of “technical”. Areas such as retail or caring are as technical as a lot of jobs that are included in this structure. I therefore hope that this is an amendment and approach to which the Government will give consideration.

[Lord Aberdare]

My Lords, I add only one very small point: it seems to me that part of the problem with the esteem in which some of these technical and professional qualifications are held is that they are seen in a rather narrow light. The word “technical” rather reinforces the problem. A lot of people who might be interested in creative or public sector qualifications or some others might be put off by the word “technical”, which makes it seem more narrow than it needs to be.

Technical and Further Education Bill

Lord Lucas Excerpts

2nd reading (Hansard): House of Lords
Wednesday 1st February 2017 Lords Chamber

[Lord Lucas (Con)]

My Lords, I welcome this Bill and declare my associations with City & Guilds and the Good Careers Guide, as recorded in the register. I will start by looking at the interface between what this Bill does and schools. As the right reverend Prelate has just said, on the supply side of technical education we have IFATE—which is actually an astrology website, so perhaps we need a different name for it—and in the interface between technical education and schools, we have the Careers & Enterprise Company, which is showing immense promise. But we are missing the bit inside schools. How do you manage the interface within a school, with all these multifarious opportunities and things that need to be understood and looked at, when you have, as the noble Baroness, Lady Morris, said, a very straightforward system of teaching children to some very well-defined exams?

The answer, as the Minister suggested to me on other occasions, is to have a dedicated person within each school whose responsibility it is to interface between everything going on in the school and the plethora of opportunities outside and to make sure that a lot of it gets in and is understood. Without that flow we will be in serious danger of having blocked pipework. All these opportunities we are creating outside are just not getting into schools—not being seen by the pupils who need them and not being understood by schools, or indeed by parents.

The answer, or at least an answer that we should look at, is to allow employers to devote some, say 5%, of their apprenticeship levy to unblocking this pipe—through, I would suggest, the Careers & Enterprise Company, because we want to know that it will be well managed—to allow employers to say, to some degree, “I want to work with this school and that school”, but allowing the Careers & Enterprise Company to divert some money to its cold spots. Then we could start to build a really active and close association between employers, schools and pupils.

This would influence the direction that pupils take in life in the sort of way that my noble friend Lord Baker was talking about. If there is a really active understanding and appreciation of what employers want, it would encourage pupils to move in that direction. Estonia is a good place to learn lessons from, and we could pick up on its idea of computer-based maths, too. To go in the direction of greater connectedness between schools, and to do it now because we are creating so much extra technical education, would be a useful thing that we could move forward on with the Bill.

I will also pick up on certification. It seems to some of the people who have been writing to me a bit odd that the Government should be taking on the role of certification of technical qualifications—but I think it is a great opportunity. We will suddenly have a consolidated list of former apprentices and holders of technical qualifications. There are all sorts of uses for that. We can push continuous professional development, and we can get a lot of feedback on the qualifications and apprenticeships that we are providing and feed that into the system for improvement. We will have a register of people who have been through these things, which will make it much easier for them to get employed and for us to understand where shortages are.

The other thing we should do in that instance is to give these people something to put after their name. We give university graduates BA, or something similar. What are we going to do for apprentices? They cannot call themselves “former apprentices”. We need something in which they can take pride and which enables them to say, “I am an apprentice and I passed”. It should not be just university graduates or, indeed, school leavers, who can put something after their name.

My next question on the Bill concerns how the 15 routes—I do not know what you call them; since this involves Sainsbury’s, they should probably be called “aisles”—work. How do we get from standards which are quite loose, with phrases such as, “must be good at IT”, to something which is well specified, absolutely clear and has a set of deliverables on which qualifications and assessment materials can be built? I do not understand who it is intended will do what job in that process. I shall be quite content for the Minister to give me some homework in this area; I just have not found what I need at the moment and would be grateful for his help. But I hope that we are not going into something which is too top-down. We have tried this before with technical qualifications. I liked the feel of diplomas but we just did not get it right—and nor did we with individual learning accounts. This needs to be a much more bottom-up process as well as the top-down organisation, and I hope that that is what we shall see.

Who in this structure is really doing quality assurance? Who is making sure that the process is running well, and how does that work? How do industries such as utilities interface with it? There is no utilities aisle; it is sort of scattered between three or four of them, but it is an area where we are looking at some very big employment opportunities as technology changes. How does it work for an industry such as that?

I have another question in this area: how do single awarding organisations work? This is a discussion we had concerning GCSEs a few years ago. We settled on keeping a multiplicity, and I think for very good reasons: you get flexibility; you avoid single points of failure; and it is much easier to spur on improvement and to change something that is not working well. Why are the Government going in a different direction in a much more complicated area, where it is very difficult, even within one aisle, for one awarding organisation to be expert at everything and to cover every variation within that aisle?

The Bill as drafted takes intellectual property away from awarding organisations and gives it to IFATE. That is a very unusual structure. Usually, if an organisation has put a lot of investment into creating assessment and qualification structures, that is the intellectual property of the organisation—and for good reasons, too, because that gives it an incentive to continue to develop and keep the quality up.

We are also looking at a lot of qualifications that will embed vendor qualifications, certainly in the tech area, because that is what employers want. Are we really saying that their IP will also be ceded to IFATE? We need to look at this corner carefully to make sure that we have the incentives and the practicalities right.

On insolvency, as the noble Baroness, Lady Wolf, has already said, we need to think about what happens with training providers and, indeed, awarding organisations when they go bust, as the Bill will put them under a lot of stress. We need to understand how they work, because they are just as capable of tipping learners into an abyss if they go under.

I look forward to the Bill’s Committee stage—I think that it will be a great deal less stressful for the Minister than the Higher Education and Research Bill was for his colleague—and I wish it well.

Higher Education and Research Bill

Lord Lucas Excerpts

Committee: 6th sitting (Hansard): House of Lords
Wednesday 25th January 2017 Lords Chamber

We have heard much about the importance of student satisfaction in our deliberations, and rightly so. That is one of the metrics that is supposed to drive up teaching standards, yet it seems to ignore the fact that good teaching depends not just on well-qualified staff but on well-motivated staff. What sort of motivation stems from not knowing whether you are going to be teaching a class next week, far less next term or next session? That is a question universities have to consider very carefully and the requirements of Amendment 368 will encourage them to do that. Those that place short-term economic considerations before the long-term interests of their staff—and, by extension, their students—are treading a path that leads to poorer standards and potentially lasting damage to their reputation. Institutions that have nothing to hide in terms of employment practices—and their impact on staff/student ratios—have nothing to fear, and neither should the Government in accepting this improvement to Clause 59. I beg to move.

[Lord Lucas (Con)]

My Lords, I have three amendments in this group. Amendment 371 urges the Government to make as much of these data open as possible. This is not really the pattern with university data at the moment. Even HESA, which is an easy organisation to deal with, none the less guards them closely so that it can charge fees for their release. I think life will be a good deal better for prospective students if that information is more widely used, available and circulated. It is a principle the Government have established in other areas such as Ordnance Survey and the Land Registry, and it has worked extremely well. I would like to push the Government in that direction so far as university data are concerned.

My second amendment is Amendment 383 and we have been here before. It should be obvious that the principal customers for these data are prospective students. They are the ones who need to know about universities. We really ought to take the views of people who look after prospective students into account in deciding how data should be made available.

I have tabled Amendment 413 because there is a tendency for bodies, once you have given them the power to charge, to start inventing things to do, because they can always get them paid for. Look at UCAS, for example; it probably does five times as much as it needs to. The central “apply” function, which everybody uses, is only about 20% of UCAS’s activity. The rest it can get paid for and it is interesting, so it does it. This body ought to be under tighter financial discipline than that.

[Baroness Garden of Frognal]

My Lords, I support the amendments in this group, particularly Amendment 368, which is about the number of staff on non-permanent contracts and zero-hours contracts, as the noble Lord, Lord Watson, set out. As we have discussed before, these sorts of metrics might be more valuable to the TEF than many of the metrics already in it, because the non-permanent staff and zero-hours staff will have a greater impact on teaching quality than many of the other things which the TEF purports to measure. On Amendments 376 and 377, it is important at all stages of the Bill to ensure that adult, mature and part-time students are included as part of the student population.

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[Viscount Younger of Leckie]

I will attempt to answer the points made by my noble and learned friend. Surely this is encompassed by the safeguards that I outlined. There will be an opportunity on a regular basis, as I mentioned, to analyse and scrutinise the statement showing the amount of fees, including those that are unconnected, and how they were made up.

[Lord Lucas]

My Lords, I am grateful to my noble friend for his reply on Amendment 371, but I think he rather missed the point. In respect of school data, the Department for Education already publishes extensive information, under the heading of performance tables, as open data. The level of information has grown substantially over the years and is free for anyone to reuse, as is the database on schools, EduBase. I am very sorry to say, as the proprietor of the Good Schools Guide, that this has resulted in the emergence of a lot of competitors, which is thoroughly tiresome. While it would be convenient for me if the Government did not do it, it is very good for the economy and for students and pupils that they have, and it is the pattern I would like them to pursue with regard to university data.

The Department for Education also makes available the National Pupil Database, which is confidential, at various levels. The whole database is available to the “very serious” level of researchers, but anonymised information is also available at pupil level, which is immensely useful for understanding how schools are operating and how various examinations and other aspects of the school system are working. That is a precedent for really good practice that is, now, contained within the same department that will look after university data.

The practice for university data is different. It is either held by UCAS, in which case it is effectively not available to anybody, or by HESA. In the latter case, there is a long application process to determine whether it will let the data out because nothing is standardised and you have to ask permission from individual institutions. It then charges a hefty fee. This is a comfortable situation for me, as a user of HESA data, because it means I do not get a lot of competition, but it is not the way the market should be. The market should be open. The only reason that the use of the data is charged for is that HESA wants to make money out of it. If it is given the power to charge institutions then it is in the interests of the economy and the country that it makes it freely available whenever it can. It is much better for the country that HESA should make a little bit of money by making it available in a more restricted way and for a large fee, or a substantial fee—not an unreasonable fee; HESA is a good organisation. We should go open. The Government, as a whole, have made a lot of progress in making much bigger collections of data open, when they were formally charged for. There has been a lot of benefit from that. That is the practice we should follow with the university data.

[Lord Watson of Invergowrie]

My Lords, this has been a livelier group of amendments than had been anticipated. Gratitude is due to the noble Baroness, Lady Wolf, for exciting some controversy. It is a surprise that the shortest amendment to the entire Bill—it is just two letters—led to so much impassioned debate.

The Minister is treading on rather boggy ground if he feels that his legal people will be able to counter the argument of the noble and learned Lord, Lord Mackay, about the precedent for statutory bodies. The Minister has developed the practice of writing letters to us in Committee. I suggest to the noble and learned Lord, Lord Mackay, that he might write to the Minister on this particular point and perhaps assist in clarifying the position and getting the Minister to think again.

I liked the noble and learned Lord’s point about spotting a reference to an employee in the Bill. He was, of course, referring to a part that we will consider on Monday, but that it took his legal eagle eye to detect it underlines my point about staff being notable by their absence from the Bill, and hence, I would suggest, being undervalued. I take on board what the Minister said about it being expected that the OfS will consult staff. Experience tells us that expecting organisations or employers to do something on behalf of their staff often leads to disappointment, and that is why I believe it should have been a bit more explicit in the Bill. I suspect, however, that his comments today may well be quoted by a number of staff and their representative organisations in future. There is another question, which perhaps he could answer in one of his famous letters, which is: what recourse would be open to staff if it was shown that the OfS was not considering their views, as I suggested in my amendment?

Other noble Lords spoke about financial issues, which I think remain as they were prior to the debate, but it has been both enjoyable and interesting. On that basis, I beg leave to withdraw my amendment.

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Moved by

[Lord Lucas]

416: Clause 63, page 39, line 37, at end insert “, limited to the specific activities of the registered provider under the same contractual conditions as registration.”

[Lord Lucas]

My Lords, many of the providers which will come under this Bill are operating with similar qualifications in other markets and countries. I thoroughly approve of this clause and what it aims to do, but the providers deserve the same level of confidentiality from researchers as they get from regulators. I beg to move.

[Baroness Goldie]

My Lords, I thank the noble Lords, Lord Stevenson and Lord Lucas, and the noble Baroness, Lady Wolf, for raising these important issues.

The amendments seek to limit the power of the OfS or someone working on its behalf to carry out efficiency studies on HE providers under Clause 63. I assure the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, that we entirely accept the principle of what he is seeking to achieve here. For many providers on the register the teaching of higher education will be just a part of their overall business. Many providers will also carry out other activities, such as offering corporate conference facilities or operating sports facilities which the public can access.

Let me also assure my noble friend that the Government would not want the OfS to look at the efficiency of those other activities. Instead, the Government would expect the OfS to confine its efficiency studies to providers’ HE teaching activities. I accept that the Bill does not explicitly limit the OfS’s efficiency studies power in the way my noble friend seeks but we do not think that these amendments would achieve that laudable end. They seek to link the OfS’s efficiency studies power to those activities which are subject to the contract between the OfS and the provider relating to the provider’s registration. A provider’s registration, however, is not subject to a contract.

The Bill is not, though, entirely silent on how the OfS should carry out its functions. I point to the general duties this Bill places on the OfS in Clause 2(1)(e), which requires the OfS to,

“use the OfS’s resources in an efficient, effective and economic way”.

Furthermore, Clause 2(1)(f) places a duty on the OfS to have regard to,

“the principles of best regulatory practice, including the principles that regulatory activities should be … transparent, accountable, proportionate and consistent, and … targeted only at cases in which action is needed”.

Let me also assure my noble friend that individuals conducting efficiency studies on behalf of the OfS will be subject to the same confidentiality requirements as the OfS.

I hope that these latter points provide my noble friend with some reassurance that the OfS will carry out its efficiency studies in the focused way he seeks to achieve. This level of focus is certainly something the Government want to see. In these circumstances I ask him to withdraw Amendment 416.

[Lord Lucas]

My Lords, I am very grateful to my noble friend for that explanation, which I shall go away and chew over. It is not that the university might be running a tiddlywinks club for money that worries me, but that it may well be selling the same higher education product as commercial training outside the university sector, or internationally online. These are both money-making activities where the university is concerned about commercial confidentiality but, under the Bill’s current wording, researchers might be asked to look at and gather data on them.

I shall have to do some work between now and Report, but I hope the Government will look again at what I have said today. I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.

Amendment 416 withdrawn.

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[Baroness Brown of Cambridge]

My Lords, in moving Amendment 420, which is in my name and that of my noble friend Lady Wolf, I will also speak to Amendments 421 and 421A in my noble friend’s absence.

These amendments bring us back to the discussion we had previously about the costs and charges of the OfS. The purpose of the amendments is to probe the issue of who will act to control the costs and charges of the regulator—the Office for Students. Higher education providers will pay these charges, and hence students, at the end of the day, will have to bear them. The OfS is referred to frequently as a regulator by Ministers and others talking about the Bill, but nowhere is it clear in the Bill whether or not the OfS will have to sign up to the Regulators’ Code, published by the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills in 2014. If it was clear that the OfS was covered by the code, it would provide some of the reassurance sought in a number of amendments to the Bill.

The code for example requires that regulators must consider how they can best minimise the,

“costs of compliance for those they regulate”—

the issue behind some of these amendments. They also,

“should avoid imposing unnecessary regulatory burdens”,

and,

“should carry out their activities in a way that supports those they regulate to comply and grow”.

As your Lordships can hear, the language of the Regulators’ Code is both clear and supportive. Can the Minister provide assurance that the OfS will sign up to the Regulators’ Code? It would be helpful in providing clarity and reassurance to the sector. I beg to move.

[Lord Lucas]

My Lords, I am greatly in sympathy with what the noble Baroness has just said. I very much hope that universities will carry those principles through into their current practice of taking lots of money off students who are studying humanities in order to give it to students who are studying sciences. The little bits of money being unfairly taken off students to fund the OfS are not a very substantial worry in proportion to what universities are already doing to students on different classes of course.

[Lord Stevenson of Balmacara]

My Lords, I will speak to Amendment 423 in my name. The question is about grants to the OfS for set-up and running costs, but there is the additional possibility, picked up in the amendment of the noble Baroness, Lady Brown, that there may be other aspects and bright ideas that come to mind about how these charges might be recouped. The amendment asks whether or not there are tight guidelines available which would restrict the ability of the OfS to raise funds in a broader sense other than specifically for set-up and running costs. I look forward to hearing the Minister’s response.

The point raised by the noble Baroness, Lady Brown, in her opening remarks on Amendment 420 is important, because we still worry a bit about what the nature of the beast called “OfS” is. Is it a regulator? It has been said that it is, and if it is, does it fall under the Regulators’ Code? I think I heard the Minister say on a previous amendment that it did not qualify to be considered within the code of practice for regulators. But if that is so, why call it a regulator? It will cause confusion and doubt if, in the public mind, it is a regulator for the sector but in fact it is not because it does not fulfil the criteria that would normally apply to other regulators. As the Minister said, these are not unhelpful comments in relation to regulator practice. They would clarify a lot of the uncertainty we have been experiencing in terms of how the regulator will operate. It might be that there is a case for it, even though it was not intended.

The noble and learned Lord, Lord Mackay, has pointed out a number of times that there are other statutory provisions and considerations that might bear on how this Bill is constructed and issues relating to it. It is wise to have a wider net on these matters than simply to focus on the wording of the Bill. If there are other considerations that we ought to be aware of, it would be helpful if the Minister could respond, making quite clear what it is that drives the determination that the regulatory code does not apply in this area, even though some of the factors might be helpful and effective in terms of how it discharges its responsibilities.

--- Later in debate ---

[Baroness Garden of Frognal]

My Lords, I support the amendment. As the noble Baroness, Lady Wolf, said, the possible proliferation of new universities is likely to include a great many offering subjects such as business and management, and far fewer offering subjects such as civil engineering, artificial intelligence and modern languages—whereas it would make sense for any new provision to arise out of shortages in disciplines and skills within the UK.

Secondly, there are parts of the country that are ill served by further and higher education. I have noble friends from Berwick-upon-Tweed who often relay the lack of local provision for local people to study. This is a cause of unfairness, not only in the north-east but in other parts of the country which are also ill served. If new provision were being set up it would make a lot of sense to look geographically at the parts of the country where there is less provision for people to study. Surely it would be a helpful part of the duties of the Office for Students to ensure that new providers should be established only—or mainly, perhaps—where they meet needs both of location and of provision. The amendment therefore seems a helpful addition to the Bill.

[Lord Lucas]

I too support the amendment. There are things that only Governments can do. If we want an example of creating universities, we should look at the career of our late colleague Lord Briggs and what he did, and what the status of the institutions he created is now. They are considered to be top-ranking universities. As the noble Baroness, Lady Wolf, said, they were just made and put in place and they ran. It can be done. Indeed, it is happening overseas: other countries are doing it.

We are proud that we have a collection of top-ranking international universities. Why do we not want another one? What would it take to make another one? It would take substantial action by the Government. Do we need a tech powerhouse on the lines of Stanford or MIT? Yes, I think we probably do. As my noble friend Lord Ridley said, there is a space for that—but it is not going to happen through little institutions founding themselves. We have seen enough of what that is like. I am involved with a couple of small institutions trying to become bigger ones, and it is a very hard path. Reputation is hard won in narrow areas, and it takes a long time. Look at how long it has taken BPP to get to its current size: it has taken my lifetime.

The Government can make things happen much faster, and if they realise that things need to be done, they can do that. For them to come to that realisation, a process of being focused on it is needed, and the committee proposed in the amendment certainly represents one way of achieving that. I would like to see, for instance, much wider availability of a proper liberal arts course in British universities. By and large, they are deciding not to offer such courses. If the Government said, “We want to see it; we will fund this provision”, and if the existing universities did not respond, we could set up a new one, in a part of the country that needed it. That would be a great thing. Equally, the idea might be taken up by existing universities. That is not going to happen through the market, because the market in this area is far too slow. But the Government can do it, and they ought to be looking to do it.

[Lord Stevenson of Balmacara]

I support the amendment and endorse everything that the noble Baroness, Lady Wolf, said in introducing it. She hit the nail on the head very firmly. There are issues around new providers. There is not very good evidence, and the evidence that there is seems to be anecdotal rather than scientific. The information published recently by HEPI threw doubt on whether many of the institutions that have come forward were bona fide or would survive, and some questionable practices were exposed—so there is an issue there.

In addition to the points that the noble Baroness made, which I endorse, there is, again, a gap in the centre of what the Office for Students is being established to do. It could have been imagined—pace the points made by the noble Lord, Lord Willetts, about not wanting to overload the OfS—that it would have a responsibility to speak for the sector to the Secretary of State about the gaps that it may see in provision, and the issues that may need to be picked up in future guidance. I would have expected that to be the normal thing.

However, it is interesting to see that the general duties in Clause 2 do not cover it. They are all about functions to do with quality, competition, value for money, equality of opportunity and access. They are nothing to do with surveying and being intelligent about the future and how it might go. However, as the noble Viscount, Lord Ridley, said, the game may have changed a bit now with the publication of a strongly worded industrial strategy—or at least, we hope it will turn into an industrial strategy after the consultation period. Out of that will come a requirement to think much harder about the training and educational provision that will support and supply the industrial machine that we will need as we go forward into the later parts of this century. It therefore makes sense to have advance intelligence about this, and to recruit from those who have expertise. It makes even more sense to do that in the way suggested by the amendment.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Lucas]

My Lords, can my noble friend confirm, as I gather from his speech, that the proposals made by the Home Secretary in her speech to the Conservative Party conference in relation to students are no longer being proceeded with?

[Viscount Younger of Leckie]

My understanding is that during that speech she undertook to go ahead with the consultation, as I have made clear.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Rees of Ludlow]

My Lords, I fully endorse the amendment and the remarks of the noble Lord, Lord Patten. I am from a different university but it has entirely similar concerns. I work in a small department where all of the last five faculty appointments were of people from outside the UK. Crucially, we depend upon being attractive to these people but it has been much harder to persuade them to accept positions post Brexit, because not only is there uncertainty about their future employment but they will almost certainly risk losing the freedom for their family to come here in the post-Brexit era. Therefore, we have the same concerns of many other segments of society.

One has only to imagine a young academic from, say, India, Singapore or China deciding which country they wish to work in. It is clear that the attraction of the UK compared with other countries has been greatly diminished by recent events and, unless we can send a signal to counter those trends, we will lose out in the long run. I note that the Government promised some special treatment for bankers; I think that, equally, they should provide it for other skilled occupations, including academics.

I want to make one further remark. Of the last six presidents of the Royal Society, three were born outside this country. We have had a great tradition of attracting to this country scientists who have made their careers here because of the appeal of our universities and our scientific excellence. All that is in jeopardy if we do not pay regard to the concerns expressed in connection with this amendment.

[Lord Lucas]

My Lords, I hope that in the course of this Bill we will make an amendment somewhere in this area or in that of the previous amendment, and I think that we will have to consider carefully what that amendment is. We know that we will be up against a tough negotiator who, in the case of Brexit, has said that no deal is preferable to a bad deal. Unless we can steel ourselves to that level, we will not get our way.

[Lord Stevenson of Balmacara]

My Lords, this has been another good debate. In some senses the previous amendment and the two amendments in this group are two sides of the same coin. The first amendment, proposed by the noble Lord, Lord Hannay, set an aspiration for what we were trying to do about the flow of students that, for all the reasons we gave, we wanted to see. The two amendments we are discussing now deal with the detail of how we could achieve that—they could probably be combined to make the point made by the noble Lord, Lord Lucas.

I do not need to say much more about this; I just want to put one point. On our first day in Committee we spent a lot of time talking about what we thought about our universities, what they were and what they were about. We have not really come back to the amendment we were debating then—which is probably just as well, as the wording was, I admit, not very good. The essence of it was an attempt to reach out to an aspiration that everyone in the Chamber, apart from those on the Government Front Bench, felt—that universities do have a particular distinctive nature and character. I argue that these two amendments help us to articulate that in a rather special way: for all the people who attend those universities—our children, and any other students who come to them—we want the very best quality of teaching and research available. That aspiration can be met only if we are able to recruit for it, and that is what these amendments would achieve.

--- Later in debate ---

[Baroness Deech]

My Lords, I have spoken many times before about freedom of speech. I want to link together the Prevent guidance amendment, this amendment and Amendment 469. In my view they stand and fall together because they are trying to demarcate the line between lawful and unlawful freedom of speech. That is all that matters, including in the Prevent guidance.

People often see freedom of speech as too broad and as encompassing everything, but it is always within the law. I anticipate that in response the Government will say that freedom of speech is already guaranteed. However, Section 43 of the Education (No. 2) Act 1986 is too narrow. It is treated as limited to meetings and to the refusal of the use of premises to persons with unpopular beliefs. Universities have not handled this well. They have wrongly refrained from securing freedom of speech where student unions are involved, on the grounds that the unions are autonomous. That is not the case under charity law, nor does it fit with the universities’ own public sector equality duty. Moreover, Section 43(8) of that same Act expressly includes student unions. Universities have treated their duty as fulfilled if they have a code of practice concerning freedom of speech.

However, the practice of censorship is spreading, both by universities and by student unions. As I have explained before to this House, many explicit restrictions on speech are now extant, including bans on specific ideologies, behaviours, political affiliations, books, speakers and words. Students even get expelled for having controversial views. The National Union of Students has a safe-space policy and brands certain beliefs as dangerous and to be repressed, without regard to what is legal or illegal. The academic boycott of Israel-related activities is illegal as it discriminates against people on the grounds of their nationality and religion, and is contrary to the “universality of science” principle. Indeed, in this era of Brexit we should point out that attempts to put barriers in the way of exchange between scientists and other academics, inside or outside the EU, who wish to collaborate in research and conferences conflict with the principle of the universality of science, and it would be the same if other European states put barriers in the way of UK researchers. A recent bad example of behaviour is the LSE, which silenced a lecture by its own lecturer Dr Perkins because of his unpopular views on unemployment.

Freedom of speech in the UK is limited. I will not give noble Lords the whole list of measures; I shall name just a few. It is limited by the prohibition of race hatred in the Public Order Act 1986, the Protection from Harassment Act 1997, the Equality Act 2010, and the Charities Act 2006 as it applies to student unions, defamation, the encouragement of terrorism and incitement to violence. There is a great deal of law for universities to take on board in permitting lawful freedom of speech in any case.

We need a new clause to go beyond meetings and make all this clear. Students have been closing down free speech and universities have neither intervened, nor protected it, nor taken action when it is lawful— or unlawful. We all recall when the Nobel laureate, Sir Tim Hunt, was hounded out of University College London. Section 43 was irrelevant, because his tasteless joke was made abroad. Universities are not taking up training offers about freedom of speech—what is lawful and what is unlawful. This amendment would ensure that lecturers and university authorities took cognisance of the law, got training in it and ceased to treat student unions as autonomous. They should know that they have a duty to promote good relations between different groups on campus under the Equality Act. I wish this amendment were not necessary, but it is.

[Lord Lucas]

My Lords, I very much support Amendment 468. It puts the matter clearly and positively. It needs doing. You only need to look at what is happening in US universities. There is a particularly nasty story coming out of Princeton today on the suppression of free speech. This ought to be the core of what is happening in universities. Within universities, we ought not to prohibit people from offending other people. There has to be the free exchange of ideas and this can be pretty buffeting from time to time. As is said in Amendment 468, if there are things going on which are illegal, then we should deal with them as illegal. Beyond that, we should not. We should allow ideas to flourish and grow and contest with each other at universities.

I do not support Amendment 469 in the same way. The idea of preventing speech requires you to know in advance what is going to be said. This means, if you fear that someone might say something, you are justified in stopping them coming to speak. This is a very difficult road to go down. Yes, take sanctions against people who allow illegal speech—this seems reasonable. If I invite a speaker in and they are then horrifically unlawful, I should face sanctions for that, even if I lose my right to arrange future meetings. However, to prevent it—to say that somebody at the university should know what someone is going to say in the future—I do not think is a good way to go.

I hope we will have the courage to stand behind Amendment 468 and say where our principles are because there is a great tide of the opposite coming across the Atlantic.

Higher Education and Research Bill

Lord Lucas Excerpts

Committee: 5th sitting (Hansard - continued): House of Lords
Monday 23rd January 2017 Lords Chamber

[Lord Lucas (Con)]

My Lords, to pick up on the recently finished speech of the noble Baroness, Lady Wolf, I thoroughly agree with the three main points she made. First, producing a mixed indicator, as the Government propose, would not be useful to students or others looking at the quality of a university or a course. It would be like composing a meal out of mincemeat, cornflakes and cleaning fluid. Each of those things is useful in its own right, but mix them together and they have no function. Keep them separate, as the noble Baroness advocated, and you get some very useful data on which students can judge in their own terms the quality of a university.

Secondly, let these things be criterion-referenced. We have a real problem at the moment in GCSE—we are saying that every child should get English and Maths, but we are making that impossible, because we make these exams harder as students do better. About 30% are required to fail in order to meet the requirements of Ofqual. We have to be careful about this when we are looking at a bronze, silver or gold indicator. If we do not make these indicators criterion-referenced, we are saying that, whatever happens— however well our universities do—we will always call 20% of them bronze. In other words, we will put them into an international students’ “avoid at all costs” category. That seems a really harmful thing to do. If these criteria mean anything —if there is a meaning to any of the elements going into the TEF—we should be able to say, “We want you to hit 60%.” Why not? Why do the criteria have to be relative? They do not mean anything as relative criteria. They must have absolute meanings and they must be absolute targets.

Thirdly, this really adds up. The noble Lord, Lord Liddle, made it clear that gold, silver and bronze indicators—this big step change between the three grades —are not suited to a collection of imprecise measures. You do not know whether an institution that you have placed towards the bottom of silver is actually bronze or, worse, whether something in bronze is actually in the middle of silver. It is not that exact. You have to do what the Government do elsewhere in education statistics—for example, in value added on schools—which is, yes, to publish a value, but publish a margin of error too. That way, people get to learn that you might be saying: “This is actually 957 on your scale of 1,000, but the error margin is somewhere between 900 and 1,010.” You get used to the imprecision, to understand that this is not precise, so you can put a proper value on the information you are being given.

[Lord Watson of Invergowrie (Lab)]

My Lords, I am speaking to the proposal, in the name of my noble friend Lord Stevenson, that Clause 25 should not stand part of the Bill.

That clause refers to the Office for Students taking over HEFCE’s current administrative responsibilities to deliver the TEF on behalf of the Secretary of State. I say in passing how disappointed I am that so many in your Lordships’ House, whom I thought would come to hear this debate on TEF metrics, have now departed. Perhaps that was not the reason they were here after all. Those of us who are ploughing through the Bill until all hours of the night realise that this is an important topic. The fact that we have had so many speakers on it is a clear reflection of that.

As the Minister will be aware, there is widespread concern across the sector at the use of proxy metrics, including statistics on graduate earnings, in an exercise that was supposed to be about teaching quality. On the face of it, there is some logic to the metrics. It is difficult to imagine an excellent course, the teaching, support and assessment for which the students think are rubbish, and that a large proportion of the students do not complete; or that hardly anyone who completes it manages to find employment or get a place on a postgraduate course.

Where metrics are used, they have to be much more securely evidence-based than those suggested. Last week in Committee, our Amendments 196 and 198 would have obliged the Office for Students to assess the evidence that any proposed metric for assessing teaching quality is actually correlated to teaching quality, and ensured that, prior to making that assessment, the OfS consulted those who know first-hand what is needed to measure teaching quality: academic staff and students. The Minister did not comment on that point, so it remains one on which I should like to hear his opinion. The importance of ensuring the statistics used are reliable and evidence-based cannot be overstated. They must earn and retain the confidence of the higher education sector—and that involves academics, students and administrators.

In her Amendment 201, the noble Baroness, Lady Wolf, seeks to ensure the quality of the statistics used by the OfS, and this should be a basic requirement. I support my noble friend Lord Lipsey in questioning the validity and value of the National Student Survey. The survey merely asks students about their perceptions of teaching at their institution. By definition, these perceptions are subjective and cannot involve comparing institutions. I heard what the noble Lord, Lord Willetts, said, when he suggested that similar institutions could be compared in terms of their ethnic make-up and students’ economic background. That kind of benchmarking sounds improbable at best because, even if suitable comparators could be found, the question is, how would the outcome be weighted?

It sounds as though gold, silver and bronze categories would be created before the metrics had even been measured. As I said, that sounds improbable to me, and I agree with the noble Baroness, Lady Wolf, that benchmarking is surely not the answer. Linking institutions’ reputations to student satisfaction is likely to encourage academics to mark more generously and, perhaps, even avoid designing difficult, more challenging courses.

With academics increasingly held accountable for students’ learning outcomes, students’ sense of responsibility for their own learning—something I thought was a core aspect of higher education—will surely diminish. We are now entering an era where students dissatisfied with their grades can sue their universities. Improbable as that sounds, only last week the High Court ruled that Oxford University had a case to answer, in response to a former student who alleged that what he termed “boring” and “appallingly bad” teaching cost him a first-class degree and the opportunity of higher earnings.

This may be the shape of things to come. Last year, nearly 2,000 complaints were made by students to the higher education Ombudsman, often concerning contested degree results. Nearly a quarter were upheld, which led to universities being ordered to pay almost £500,000 in compensation. Does anyone seriously believe that the introduction of the TEF metrics will lead to a reduction in such complaints?

Metrics used to form university rankings are likely to reveal more about the history and prestige of those institutions than the quality of teaching that students experience there. The Office for National Statistics report, on the basis of which the TEF is being taken forward, made it clear that they were told which metrics to evaluate, leading to the conclusion that these metrics were selected simply because the data were available to produce them. It is widely acknowledged that students’ experience in their first year is key in shaping what they gain from their time at university, yet the focus of the proposed metrics, of course, is mainly on students’ experiences in their final year and after graduation.

The ONS report was clear that the differences between institutions’ scores on the metrics tend to be narrow and not significant. So the majority of the judgment about who is designated gold, silver or bronze will actually be based on the additional evidence provided by institutions. In other words, an exercise that is supposedly metrics-driven will in fact be decided largely by the TEF panels, which is, by any other description, peer review.

Although the Minister spoke last week about how the TEF would develop to measure performance at departmental level, the ONS report suggested that the data underpinning the metrics would not be robust enough to support a future subject-level TEF. Perhaps the Minister can clarify why he believes that this will not be the case—the quality of courses in a single university tend to be as variable as the quality of courses between institutions. As I said in Committee last week, this would also mean that students’ fees were not directly related to the quality of the course they were studying. A student at a university rated gold or silver would be asked to pay an enhanced tuition fee, even if their course at that university was actually below standard—a fact that was disguised in the institution’s overall rating.

Learning gain—or value added—has been suggested as an alternative, perhaps better, measure of teaching quality and is being explored in other countries. At a basic level, this measure looks at the relationship between the qualifications and skills level a student has when starting their degree programme, compared to when they finish—in other words, a proper, reliable means of assessing what someone has gained from their course of study.

The BIS Select Committee report on the TEF metrics published last year recommended that priority should be given to the establishment of potentially viable metrics relating to learning gain. I hope the Minister will have something positive to say on that today, or, failing that, on Report. We do not believe that the metrics as currently proposed are fit for purpose; more importantly, nor do many of those within the sector who will be directly involved with the TEF. That should be a matter of some concern for the Minister, for his colleague the Minister for Universities and Science, and indeed for the Government as a whole.

--- Later in debate ---

Moved by

[Lord Lucas]

207: Schedule 4, page 81, line 42, at end insert “and that no class of registered higher education providers is unrepresented, and that all individual registered higher education providers have had a voice in who is chosen to be representative of them,”

[Lord Lucas]

My Lords, in moving Amendment 207 I shall speak to the other amendments in the group. The amendment covers a point I have made before—that it is essential that the whole sector should be represented in these organisations, not just the bits that the old universities like.

Amendment 392 would extend the Secretary of State’s access to information to anything they may be required or interested to know under any enactment, rather than just under the Bill.

Amendment 395 would appoint HESA—I suspect it is HESA being talked about at this point—to take an interest in people who intend to become students, not just people who become students, because a lot of the data they produce will be used to inform people as to whether to pursue a course, which is not really of much interest to those who have already taken that decision. It is important that HESA should focus on the students-to-be as much as on people who are already students.

Amendment 400 is an alternative to Amendment 207. I do not blame the current HESA regarding the provisions of Amendment 401. It is a trap that UCAS has fallen into of putting money and its constituent institutions ahead of the interests of students. This is a difficult thing with all such bodies, such as Ordnance Survey and others: the money tends to become the focus of what they are doing. It needs government to pull them back to focus on the interests of the country as a whole and, in this case, of students in particular. As long as the Office for Students has power to keep a body on the straight and narrow in this regard, I shall be quite satisfied that the Bill does not need this additional wording.

The anti-competitive conditions in Amendment 403 again look at the way UCAS has become a constraint on the way individual universities reflect students. Anti-competitive behaviour should always be subject to the very closest scrutiny by government to justify it. I would like to know that the OfS can keep its eye on that.

Amendment 407 goes with Amendment 395. I beg to move.

[Baroness Goldie (Con)]

My Lords, I thank my noble friend for drawing attention to a range of concerns relating to how the designated bodies will operate. I offer my assurance that we share the intention that legislation must support these bodies to be responsive to the needs of current and prospective students, and representative of the whole sector. I am happy to discuss these amendments further when we meet—although, given my state of health, I quite understand if he wishes to postpone that pleasure.

The role of the designated data body is to provide reliable and robust data on the sector for students, prospective students, the OfS and the sector itself. It will gather and make available source data, but it will not to be the sole source of information. The designated body functions most closely resemble those currently carried out by the Higher Education Statistics Agency—a sector-owned body that collects and publishes official data on higher education. I should clarify that the role currently under discussion is not related to the current role of UCAS. The designated body functions do not extend to running an admissions service. I reassure my noble friend that it is absolutely the Government’s intention that the interests of prospective students will be taken into account in the new system. The Bill already allows for this.

Amendments 398, 401 and 403 would create additional conditions for the designated data body to put the interests of students above that of higher education institutions and the commercial interest, and to ensure that data collection is not anti-competitive. The Government support the broad thrust and intent of the amendments, but believe that the current drafting is sufficient. The new data body will have a duty to consider what would be helpful to students and prospective students. However, it would not be in the spirit of co-regulation to direct the order of interests of the body.

I assure my noble friend that there is no intention to give the designated body a monopoly over data publication. We have a wide range of organisations involved in providing information for students, including specialist careers advice services aimed at mature students and career changes. We would not want any reduction in this choice for prospective students. While the Bill gives the designated body the right to receive information from providers, it does not give the body any right to prevent providers sharing those data with other organisations.

On Amendments 207 and 400, the Bill already requires that the persons who determine the strategic priorities of the designated data and quality bodies represent a broad range of registered higher education providers. The quality and data bodies are designed to be independent of government, so it would not be right to prescribe the make-up of a board in the way these amendments do. Rather, the bodies should have the ability to take a view on the mix of skills they require for the challenges they face.

The Government have confidence that they have the right balance here. In these circumstances, I therefore ask my noble friend to withdraw Amendment 207.

[Lord Lucas]

My Lords, I am very grateful for the answer my noble friend has given me and for her offer of further conversations if there is anything, on reflection, I think she has not covered completely. I beg leave to withdraw my amendment.

Amendment 207 withdrawn.

Higher Education and Research Bill

Lord Lucas Excerpts

Committee: 5th sitting (Hansard - continued): House of Lords
Monday 23rd January 2017 Lords Chamber

This is simply a saving amendment, and I hope that the Minister will say whether it is the Government’s intention to adopt this amendment or to offer one of their own to the same effect on Report in order to ensure that this long-standing, beneficial and, indeed, unique provision is explicitly respected in the Bill. If the Minister is unable to be so definite, perhaps he might be willing to arrange a meeting before Report to discuss how best the necessary provisions can be made.

[Lord Lucas (Con)]

My Lords, I rise briefly to support my noble friend Lord Norton’s amendment, which would be the ideal. Certainly, we have to move away from where we are in this. I do not find the idea of validation by the OfS satisfactory, with all its conflicts of interest, but universities which set and mark their own degrees are used to that sort of conflict. This sector seems plagued with such conflicts, but I would rather do without them. We have to get to a point where universities acting as validators are not permitted and are in some way controlled by the OfS—if we do not have the arrangement that my noble friend proposes—so that they do not indulge in competitive behaviour in the way that they have in the past. It is an extremely unsatisfactory process at the moment. Validation can last for three years only. That is not in the interests of students. They must have longer-term arrangements with the universities and the universities must be held to them, if that is what we are to go on with.

One can look at examples such as the London College of International Business Studies—a 150 year-old institution, one way and another—which has its degrees validated in Switzerland. It has gone to the altar three times with UK universities, each time being left in the lurch, although it got a QAA pass in the course of one of them. It is now engaged to the Open University and has high hopes of it. I wish it good fortune, but that is not a fair way of asking an organisation to get degree-awarding powers. There has to be good behaviour and consistent behaviour on behalf of the universities.

We also need to solve the problem facing Cordon Bleu. It is an institution operating in 20 countries, awarding degrees in most of them, and extremely highly respected. It cannot come to the UK because, under the validation arrangements currently in place, the validating institution gets a complete licence to use the validatee’s IP to do whatever it wants. Indeed, we have seen one of Cordon Bleu’s competitors pillaged in that way by a UK university. All its IP was taken and used to run that university’s own degrees. That cannot be permitted as a relationship between someone seeking validation and someone offering it.

Whatever we do, we must improve where we are. I am not particularly impressed by what is in the Bill at the moment, but I very much hope that between us we can reach something that will support the entrance of good organisations to degree-awarding in this country in a way that takes account of their quality and the good reasons that they have for thinking they might be allowed to award degrees. However, as others have said, the legislation must absolutely protect the reputation of degrees in this country. We cannot have a situation where substandard organisations get to award degrees.

[Lord Stevenson of Balmacara (Lab)]

My Lords, this has been a very interesting debate. It has shone a light in strange places that I did not think we would ever get to. As a not very good Scottish Calvinist, I am probably the least able to contribute to the debates that were organised by my noble friend Lord Murphy and the right reverend Prelate. However, they make good points and I hope the Minister will be able to help to move that debate forward.

I do not like the idea that my noble friend Lord Murphy’s institutions have to act illegally but be forgiven in the courts when they are finally taken account of. We should get ahead of the game and try to sort this out.

We started with the question of how research awards needed to be done jointly between UKRI and the OfS, if that is the body. This is something we will come back to, so it is no disrespect to say that we need not spend too much time on it now, particularly as the principal proposers of Amendment 509 are missing, in one case because of fog and in the other, I think, because of Cambridge. I cannot remember which is which—your Lordships can probably guess. It is therefore probably better if we pick that up when we come back.

That leaves the central issue posed by the noble Lord, Lord Kerslake, which is how we can find a structure in a system that has institutions of the highest quality by all accounts that can provide the assurance, support and effective answers to any of the questions raised by new challenger institutions, without those challenger institutions feeling that their operations and ways of working will be squished in some sort of force majeure that will be offered by the established club.

The amendments are very interesting. The words that have been used to attack the concept of probationary degrees need nothing further from me; I think that is right. That is not the way the Government should go on this. We are looking at a way of making sure that the quality assessment—the ability to come to an enduring decision about an institution that wishes to seek degree-awarding powers—is done in a way that reflects its ability to fulfil the necessary requirements in terms of capacity, financial security, academic capacity and the rest, but does not interpose somebody else’s view about what the institution should be doing on top of that.

The right reverend Prelate suggested that some of the stuff he was talking about had been going on since 1533. That puts in perspective people’s worries about a four-year period during which tests are made of whether institutions coming into the system are able to cope. Certainly, my discussions, which were mentioned by others, suggested that people who had been through that process found it valuable, so it would be very stupid to throw it away without further consideration.

I went down memory lane with the noble Lord, Lord Norton of Louth, because I started my career in academic administration with CNAA. It was bureaucratic and a little heavy-handed but it worked very effectively. It is interesting that the final vestiges of CNAA still exist in the Open University. Maybe that is where we might want to look, as a future amendment suggests, before we start trying to create something that will not stand the test of time or advance higher education in the UK, and may indeed cause problems, many of which have been raised in this short debate.

--- Later in debate ---

Moved by

[Lord Lucas]

305: Clause 46, page 27, line 8, at end insert—
“( ) The OfS may propose conditions on validation arrangements between two registered higher education providers in order to protect the student interest including—(a) referring registered providers to an appointed arbitration panel to resolve disputes related to existing arrangements, and(b) giving guidance to registered providers on existing arrangements.”

[Lord Lucas]

My Lords, when I talked earlier about the need to give the OfS some axis in making sure that validation arrangements work well, this was what I meant. I beg to move.

[Lord Stevenson of Balmacara]

That is the second speediest moving of an amendment I have heard so far in Committee. I will be almost as brief, since we have alluded to the fact, if we have not specifically mentioned it, that the answer to a lot of our problems about the validations issue, which will come up in both this and the following group, where there is a clause stand part, and the power of validation of last resort being given to the Office for Students is to pick up the fact that the CNAA, of blessed memory, still exists, in rump form, in the Open University. That is where all its functions and assets were transferred—not that it had very many assets, I am sure—at the time of its dissolution, around the time that the polytechnics were given their degree-awarding powers and we abolished the binary line, effectively. So we have a situation in which it would be possible, I think, to obtain a validator of last resort at very little cost and certainly at no considerable worry in terms of new structures or arrangements. It would certainly resolve one of the issues that is devilling the question of the powers of the OfS, and I very much hope that this amendment will be considered very carefully.

--- Later in debate ---

[Viscount Younger of Leckie]

My Lords, in view of the very brief comments made by noble Lords in this extremely short debate, I shall also keep my comments short. I am happy to write to noble Lords if they feel that my comments are too short.

I understand that my noble friend Lord Lucas’s amendment is born of a wish to protect students, but I reassure him that there are already strong protections in place. I also reassure noble Lords once again that on our student protection plans our policy is to ensure that students’ interests are protected if a provider’s validation agreements break down.

I will comment a bit further on providers declining to validate on quality grounds. We expect that the OfS’s commissioning process should be open and transparent, so that providers clearly understand what would be expected of them if they agree to extend their validation services to other registered providers in this way. In all cases we expect the commissioned provider would need to be assured of the quality of the provision that it agrees to validate. The OfS’s commissioning process should therefore allow providers to decline to enter into validation agreements on quality grounds. So we believe that this amendment is not necessary. I therefore ask my noble friend to withdraw Amendment 305.

[Lord Lucas]

My Lords, I thank my noble friend for that brief reply. Perhaps he might enlarge on it when we meet, if not in a letter afterwards. I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.

Amendment 305 withdrawn.

Higher Education and Research Bill

Lord Lucas Excerpts

Committee: 4th sitting (Hansard - continued): House of Lords
Wednesday 18th January 2017 Lords Chamber

[Lord Stevenson of Balmacara]

My Lords, I will be brief. Although the phrasing of the amendment is quite broad, the intention behind it is relatively straightforward and quite narrow. In keeping with earlier debates that we have had in Committee, our feeling was that we should do all we can to make sure that those who have a commitment to extend access to higher education to as many people as possible would share the view—I think the Government also share it—that there would be value in having a more flexible system that would, in particular, include more part-time students. It therefore seemed that there was a bit of a gap, which this proposed new clause is intended to fill. With regard to access and participation, there would be a duty on the OfS to make sure that the system of admissions ensured that those who wished to apply for university were fully apprised of the fact that there were alternative models for how they pursued their higher education careers. They should think in terms of part-time or flexible courses, since that might be in some ways better than trying to do a full-time, three-year course immediately after leaving school.

I am sure that that is in the Government’s mind and that they would accept that the underlying thinking behind this is right. The amendment may not be the best way of providing this, but I thought it was worth putting it in as a probing amendment to make sure that we get on the record the Government’s commitment to this type of approach and to the idea that the architecture of regulatory and other bodies involved in the process has this as part of their thinking. I beg to move.

[Lord Lucas (Con)]

My Lords, I am happy to support the noble Lord, Lord Stevenson, on this amendment. It is only the OfS that will do these things when they need doing and keep an eye on them, and it ought to be part of what it is meant to do. It is far too easy for schools, colleges and universities to continue with their current practices and to grouse about what is happening. However, no individual or small collection of individuals ever has sufficient incentive to kick against the current system and to try to get a motion for change going. An example of that is post-qualification admission. I speak to a lot of schools, and a large number of them would like to move to post-qualification admission. Nothing will happen unless the OfS or a similar body decides to take a look at it. I hope that my noble friend can reassure me that, should the OfS or the Government wish to take a look at these things, they can do so without any powers beyond those provided in the Bill.

[Baroness Garden of Frognal (LD)]

My Lords, I support both the amendments in this group. I think that the arguments for post-qualification admissions are very strong and need further review. I would also welcome a mention in the Bill of part-time and mature students, who deserve to be given full consideration and are too often overlooked. I think that there is merit in both the amendments.

[Baroness Goldie]

My Lords, I thank noble Lords for tabling a set of amendments relating to admissions. By way of preface, I listened carefully to the points made previously by your Lordships about the importance of retaining the independent and autonomous state of higher education providers. Noble Lords will recall that I yearn to see something comparable in Scotland, but I am afraid that we have lost that.

One consequence of independence is that providers are then responsible for their own admissions decisions and, rightly, government has no power to interfere in this area. Universities are best placed to identify the candidates with the talent and potential to succeed at an institution or on a particular course, and the Bill makes it clear that this will continue. Indeed, Clause 2 ensures that the Secretary of State must have regard to the need to protect the freedom of higher education providers to determine their own admissions criteria. Clause 35 carries forward an important requirement from existing legislation that, like the current Director of Fair Access, the OfS will have a duty to protect academic freedom and institutional autonomy over admissions.

No doubt concerns would be raised across this House and the sector about the OfS overstepping its powers if a requirement regarding admissions were included in the Bill, and those concerns would be justified. The OfS will, as part of its broader duties, want to look strategically across the HE sector and to consider the implications arising from the admissions cycle. However, we would expect the OfS to work with bodies such as UCAS to ensure that the right information was available to inform a broader picture.

UCAS is a charity, established by HE providers, with a clear role in university admissions. It can and already does undertake and publish reports into admissions on behalf of the sector. Through the Bill we are introducing a transparency duty on registered HE providers, requiring them to publish application, offer and drop-out rates broken down by socioeconomic background, ethnicity and gender, and to provide the OfS with these data.

My noble friend Lord Lucas raised post-qualification applications—an issue that has been around for a number of years. As I said earlier, the autonomy of institutions in relation to admissions is enshrined in law. The current system has many strengths, including that prospective students can apply after they have their results, through clearing.

UCAS conducted its own review of the introduction of post-qualification applications and gave a clear recommendation not to move to this system. Should further investigation of the system be desired, it is for higher education providers to instigate it. The OfS could potentially be involved, but I suggest that such a requirement should not be set out in legislation.

The Government agree that part-time and adult education bring enormous benefits to individuals, the economy and employers. Our reforms to part-time learning, advanced learning loans and degree apprenticeships provide significant opportunities for mature students to learn. Allowing new providers to enter the system should result in greater choice of HE provision for part-time and distance learning, which can greatly assist mature learners. Under Clause 2, when carrying out its functions the OfS has a general duty to have regard to the need to promote greater choice and opportunities for students, which would include more choice and opportunities with regard to part-time and mature provision. However, it is important that we keep the duties of the OfS broad and overarching so as not to overburden the organisation and so that we can enable it to function efficiently and flexibly.

Having regard to what I have just said, I very much hope that the noble Lord will feel able to withdraw Amendment 128.

[Lord Lucas]

My Lords, I am sorry that the Government take the attitude they do to post-qualification admission. It seems to me that this is something in which schools and students should have a voice and that it should not be entirely down to universities. It distorts school education very substantially and therefore I think that it is not only the interests of universities that should be taken into account. However, I accept that the Government think differently.

Since the noble Baroness is in the business of dispensing bad news to me at the moment, can she confirm the rumour that we are to sit well past midnight on Monday?

[Baroness Goldie]

I have always regarded the noble Lord as my friend and I shall do my best not to alienate that happy relationship. Your Lordships will be aware that this is very significant legislation— I understand that it is unprecedented in terms of amendments. Although I have no precise timings for Monday, it may help your Lordships to know that I am given to understand that we can anticipate a long sitting, but until when, I cannot be precise about.

--- Later in debate ---

[Baroness Garden of Frognal]

My Lords, I support the right reverend Prelate’s amendment. We hear increasingly of mental ill-health and stress among students, so building in provision for them would be helpful.

On Amendment 138, as the noble Lords, Lord Stevenson and Lord Norton, have said, it seems strange not to have such a provision in the Bill. I see in the guidance notes that the wording is not quite the same, but these same provisions have been put as “the measures for a protection plan could include”, so there seems no reason why there should not be the extra assurance of having these measures spelled out in the Bill.

[Lord Lucas]

My Lords, we are surely clear that the route that we are going down will mean that institutions go bust and find themselves unable to function. My noble friend the Minister said in one of his replies to me on Monday that information as to whether a university was getting near the borderline, in terms of having the ability to admit overseas students removed from it, would be concealed. So we must expect students to be faced with the closure of their courses at short notice, and we must expect the institutions running those courses to be completely incapable of helping them.

In those circumstances, we need what my noble friend Lord Norton of Louth has proposed, which is a mutual scheme. That must have the ability to organise for the courses to happen—so it must have money and it must have agreement that room will be made for students. It must have enough leverage to deal with the Home Office, because any student who is looking at an extended time here to complete a course will be in real trouble—returning home; six-month waits—trying to organise extensions. It is difficult enough for a student at Imperial who needs an extra year for his PhD; it will be extremely difficult for students in a failed institution. We need some money, some clout and some organisation behind this. If it is not to be the sort of structure that my noble friend proposes, my Amendment 163 would dump the obligation to look after such students on the OfS—but it has to be somewhere.

[Lord Willetts]

My Lords, I welcome particularly the amendment proposed by my noble friend Lord Lucas. The official doctrine has always been that a university can go bust, but I was never able to contemplate the political feasibility of a scenario where a padlock is swinging on the gates of a university, with a group of students outside desperate to go in for their history lectures and being told, “I am terribly sorry; we’re closed”, while tumbleweed blows through the campus. Indeed, Margaret Thatcher faced this in 1985 in Cardiff. She was not willing to allow University College, Cardiff to go bust. I think that we can accept that we are functioning in an environment where in reality it will be very hard just to say, “Bad luck. You’ve done 18 months of a course and it’s come to an end”.

The question is how one should address that, which gets to the heart of some quite important issues in the Bill. There has been a fashionable doctrine for a few years of the ABTA solution—and some kind of scheme like that could be made to work—but in my experience the closest we got to this problem was clearly HEFCE. It was acting as the co-ordinator, organiser and convenor. It might have been that students had to be located at several other universities and it would get different universities to make their contributions so that students would be educated. If we get into such a scenario—my noble friend Lord Lucas is absolutely right that we have to contemplate it—it is very hard to see how it could be resolved without some convening power for the OfS, which, as I have said in other contexts in this Committee stage, is in many respects the son of HEFCE. A lot of our problems will be resolved if we think of it as the son of HEFCE. My noble friend’s proposal to make it clear that there is some legal responsibility for OfS must be an important and credible part of any solution. It is not credible to imagine that the matter could be addressed via an ABTA-type scheme.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Stevenson of Balmacara]

I have to say to the Minister, who cannot see behind her, that her noble friend was not looking that reassured.

[Lord Lucas]

No, I do not find myself reassured. I very much hope my noble friend may be able to write to us. The sort of protection plan she is talking about is starting to look extremely expensive. Are they going to hold a year’s fees in reserve? If we do not have some kind of mutual arrangement, each course will have to look out for itself; that is going to be extremely expensive and make new initiatives very difficult to finance. I would really appreciate a properly worked example of what happens when a university ceases to trade at relatively short notice.

[Baroness Goldie]

I am very happy to undertake to write to my noble friend. I have so much of interest to tell him that it will be a long letter.

Higher Education and Research Bill

Lord Lucas Excerpts

Committee: 4th sitting (Hansard): House of Lords
Wednesday 18th January 2017 Lords Chamber

This is TEF’s second year yet there remain serious doubts about the metrics and the grading, as well as fears about the reputational risk of getting this wrong and the financial consequences if the system deters students rather than highlighting areas for further improvement. There must be a more imaginative and less risky way of achieving the Government’s admirable objective of recognising the highest teaching quality, so would it not be equally wise for the Government to establish confidence in the system, evaluate it and see whether it is achieving its objective before deciding that reputations established with such commitment, effort and undoubted excellence over the last 10, 20, 30 years can be destroyed by a broad-brush, rather simplistic judgment?

[Lord Lucas (Con)]

My Lords, I agree with a great deal of what the noble Baroness, Lady Warwick, said. I am a thoroughgoing supporter of getting more information out there to enable students to evaluate the quality of teaching that they will experience at university. We have allowed things to drift a long way in the wrong direction. However, the idea that by waving a wand we should decide that 80% of British university education is sub-standard and promulgate that across the world on the basis of a collection of experimental and rather hard-to-understand metrics just seems to me daft. It is not really helpful to anyone. All we are doing is “dissing” these universities. We are not enabling anyone to choose them. If someone is choosing a university, they will look at what is going on on a course. They will not experience the university quality of teaching; they will experience what is going on on a course. That is the level at which they need data. Nor do they need the Government to say, “This is a bronze-level course”. They need the data to make their own judgment because different things matter to different students. Some students want strict, hard teachers who will push them to do well, others want someone who will get them excited about a subject and will be a source of inspiration—I imagine the noble Lord, Lord Desai, is like this—and will drive students to work extremely hard in their own time. Different students need different things. What we need is a lot of information so that students and those who advise them can make up their own minds. In that context, the amendment of my noble friend Lord Norton is a great deal better than any of mine. My noble friend’s Amendment 177 seems to me the right way to go.

I support what my noble friend Lord Willetts said: this is experimental. We need to go on down this road and have the courage to continue. However, we should recognise that this process is experimental and that we have not yet got to a point where we know that we are defining quality in the right way. It is a very difficult area to assess. On the basis of students’ experience of only one course at one university, how do you compare whether the teaching on the engineering course at Loughborough is better or worse than the teaching on the engineering course at Oxford? They are different kinds of students with different predilections on two excellent courses, but how do you compare them on a single measure? It is very difficult to understand how we get to that point or what we should be doing with that information. None the less, we want to drive up the quality of teaching and make progress in that direction.

There seems to be a wish on the Government’s part to incorporate some measure of teaching quality in their decision whether to allow a university to raise its fees. That seems to me fair enough. However, if there is to be a collection of metrics for that purpose, they should be used for that purpose. We should not try to use a set of metrics for that purpose and at the same time say that they reflect the quality of the student experience or decisions that students should make. In its dialogue with universities the department should use its own process in arriving at a decision; it should not publish its decision as if something that was good for setting fees was good for telling students what decisions they should take.

The noble Baroness, Lady O’Neill, says that there are metrics we could use. Yes, absolutely, there are things with which to experiment. If I think back to my own university days, attendance at courses rather depended on the timing of boat club dinners and whether I was supposed to go to something the following morning. I am not sure that that should reflect on the mark given to my teachers, whoever they were. So let us aim at something that encourages the creation of metrics and their publication. Let us make sure that these metrics cannot be summarised by the Government at the level of course, let alone university. It should not be the Government’s purpose to arrive at verdicts based on difficult-to-interpret information; it should be something they allow other people to do and make the best of. We certainly should not allow the Government to use these metrics for anything to do with immigration. I still remain entirely in the dark as regards the Home Office’s intentions. Let us see what response we get from the Government and be firm in our resolution not to let this measure through as it is.

[Baroness Cohen of Pimlico (Lab)]

My Lords, I remind the Committee that I am chancellor of the biggest private for-profit university in the country. We gain high marks in student surveys and in terms of employability. However, we regard both these things as at best very partial measures—student surveys, for all the reasons adduced by other Members of the House, and employability because we teach subjects, mostly law, accountancy and nursing, in which employability is slightly easier to expect. However, as part of getting degree-awarding powers, which took us four long years, we were assessed by the QAA. One of the things that was assessed was teaching quality. People who knew what they were talking about in terms of teaching quality, including from the Law Society and the Bar Council, sat in on lessons to see how we taught. When our licence was renewed in 2013, the whole thing happened again: people sat in on lessons and lectures to decide how well we were teaching. We passed with a very high standard. That might be the ideal supplementary measure because it is objective and is done by people who know what they are looking for. With the best will in the world, I do not think one can suggest that students, with their somewhat partial attendance, know what they are looking for. We need people with experience of teaching who know what they are looking for.

That leads me to the observation that the figure of 400 new entrants strikes me as amazingly high. The QAA says that it has passed through somewhere between 60 and 70 of us for degree-awarding powers since 2005, not more than that. Some of us have the title of university, some do not. These figures suggest to me that a much smaller number of higher education providers are outside the university sector than I thought. I wonder whether teaching quality assessment might not turn up as part of the duties of the new quality assessment committee, which appears later in the Bill. Might that not be part of its task, so that you have one expert assessment as opposed to the various useful consumer-type assessments which come from students liking and understanding what they are doing and getting jobs? I do not suggest that we should avoid those elements—they are excellent measures—but we need something objective as well to be sure that we are being fair to all institutions and that teaching quality is assured. I would like to come back to this later in the Bill.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Lucas]

My Lords, my noble friend made a statement of the Government’s policy regarding overseas students which was fuller and stronger than I have heard from anyone else—on which I congratulate him. Can he confirm therefore—it would be consistent with what he said—that the Home Secretary has now taken a step back from the remarks she made in her speech to the Conservative Party conference, and in particular the ones that implied she would reduce the number of students by refusing lower-quality courses, as she described them, the right to take overseas students?

On gold, silver and bronze, my noble friend is somewhat confused as to the effect of these things. As the noble Lord, Lord Desai, and others pointed out, bronze is only valuable because so many people get worse. Under the old Ofsted rating system of outstanding, good and satisfactory, it was quite clear that “satisfactory” meant “avoid at all costs”. It was the lowest rating you could get above absolute disaster. That is the way it was perceived.

Although we in this country may manage to give things time, see them in perspective and understand why it is worth sending our children to a bronze institution, it would be extremely hard for agents overseas to do so. We will be competing with other countries which will not hesitate to ask, “Why are you thinking of sending this child to a bronze institution when we in Canada”—or Australia or wherever else—“can offer them a top-quality institution doing the same course in the same subject?”. It would be really damaging.

It is also unnecessary, because it is not valuable information for a student. It is the Government’s conclusion, but what is important is the students’ and their advisers’ conclusion. The way in which the Government choose to balance particular elements of their assessment of quality do not bear on the decision that an individual student may take. That must be a matter for individual decision. We should publish the information—absolutely—but not some arbitrary percentage. Someone in the Civil Service or in some committee may decide that only 20% of our universities are excellent. At least with Ofsted there are criteria that can be relied on. This will be damaging and will hurt one of our great industries. It is not based on anything useful or on fact, but it will be treated as if it is.

[Lord Watson of Invergowrie]

My Lords, the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, mentioned, as have many other noble Lords, gold, silver and bronze. At last year’s Olympic Games an event at which many British athletes and Paralympic athletes won medals was swimming—we won many gold medals, many silver and many bronze. The Minister must be in line for a gold medal at swimming because he has been facing a torrent against him throughout the debate. He has been swimming manfully but has not made very much progress.

By my calculation, some 13 noble Lords have spoken in the last hour and 52 minutes. Of those, all were in favour of improving teaching quality, as you might expect, and of having a teaching excellence framework in some form. As all noble Lords have said, we welcome the role of Chris Husbands in developing it. However, with the exception of the noble Lord, Lord Willetts, we all believe that it cannot be delivered in the form that is proposed—and even the noble Lord, Lord Willetts, could muster no more enthusiasm for the TEF than to say that the current metrics are not as bad as claimed. That qualifies as faint praise.

Many noble Lords also spoke against the link between teaching quality and fees in principle, and more spoke in favour of rating on a basis other than the gold, silver and bronze. The noble Lord, Lord Lucas, quoted someone in Canada, looking at British institutions and spotting a bronze and thinking, “Why would I advise my son or daughter to go there rather than an institution in Canada because it is only a bronze?” The point is that the bronze institution in the UK could well be better than the institution in Canada, but the perception will not be that. Perception consistently outranks fact, and that is the big danger in the three-tier system being advanced by the Government.

I wish to make a serious point about two of the contributions in the debate—those of the noble Baroness, Lady Deech, and my noble friend Lady Warwick. Both highlighted and made powerful points on social mobility and the effects that the Government’s proposals not only could but almost certainly will have. I quoted Cambridge University in my opening remarks; that has the same fear. The Government claim to be committed to improving social mobility although some of us are unconvinced. That view is reinforced by the fact that the Minister, very disappointingly, failed even to mention social mobility in his reply. In his own terminology, he needs to reflect on that matter before Report.

In his response, the Minister referred to linking fees to quality of teaching but did not say how that would be achieved. That is the main reason for noble Lords’ opposition to the link. My noble friend Lady Cohen said that objectivity is the key here. That is what is required, and it is a quality that is lacking in the metrics as they stand at the moment.

The problem of rating on the basis of institutions has also been highlighted. The Minister said that, at the moment, the Bill allows for the scheme to be developed at institutional level and then at departmental level at some point in the future. The question mark is how. If the ratings are to be made on a departmental or faculty basis, how can you avoid, ultimately, differential fees being charged within institutions if the Government truly believe in that link? That certainly is not a road we would wish to go down. The bottom line here is that the Government need to build confidence within the sector that the path they are going down is one that will improve the sector’s quality and sustainability, particularly with so many new operators arriving.

My noble friend Lord Desai asked whether anyone would fail the exam. The Minister could not bring himself to admit it, but unless he believes that all institutions will be capable of being rated gold, the answer can only be yes. That is why our Amendment 195 recognised that fact and advocated a simple pass/fail rating. That way, every institution knows where it stands—as does everyone outside it when making their decisions. That is something that those looking at a course at a university have the right to have available when they make their choice.

I suggest that the Minister will need to come to terms with the fact he is not carrying noble Lords with him. I suggest he will need to change his position substantially before we come back to this matter, which we undoubtedly will when we next discuss it on Report. On the basis of an invigorating and very useful debate, I beg leave to withdraw my amendment.

Higher Education and Research Bill

Lord Lucas Excerpts

Committee: 3rd sitting (Hansard - continued): House of Lords
Monday 16th January 2017 Lords Chamber

Moved by

[Lord Lucas]

118: After Clause 9, insert the following new Clause—
“Freedom of information
The Secretary of State must use his or her best endeavours to ensure that all registered higher education providers are subject to the same freedom of information obligations.”

[Lord Lucas (Con)]

My Lords, although I am a thoroughgoing advocate of freedom of information, I am very conscious of what my noble friend Lord Willetts said shortly before supper: we must be careful of the degree and direction of obligations that we put on universities. This amendment is therefore very much phrased as not prescribing any particular outcome but saying that it must be equal. That is born of my experience, when, under the last Government, UCAS was deemed to have public functions and made subject to the Freedom of Information Act. I immediately requested some information from it and was refused, and went through the appeal procedure. The case having been ruled partially in my favour, UCAS went through two sets of tribunals, with QCs. It must have cost it about half a million quid to resist the commissioner’s attempts to pin it to the Freedom of Information Act obligations. That is perhaps why I reacted so fiercely to the noble Baroness, Lady Brown, when she quoted “commercial interests”. It was quite clear then that UCAS’s order of priorities was: first, making money; secondly, looking after the universities; and thirdly, the students. I did not think that was right and nor do I think it is right that universities put money first and other things second.

We are dealing—or ought to be dealing—with different kinds of institutions. On the bits that I did not get through the commissioner, some of which is information now being made available through this Bill, I failed because of the inequality of treatment of universities, which were subject to freedom of information, and other higher education institutions, for instance BPP, which were not. That inequality created a commercial tension between those who might have been asked to reveal information and those who were not subject to FoI, which prevented information being released under it. My recommendation to the Government is, whatever you do, do the same for everybody and then everybody has to comply. I beg to move.

[Baroness Garden of Frognal (LD)]

My Lords, I have Amendment 238 in this group. It was proposed by Universities UK and follows on from what the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, has just been saying about equality of treatment. The Higher Education and Research Bill creates three types of registered providers—basic, approved and approved with a fee cap. Universities, as public authorities, are currently subject to the Freedom of Information Act 2000. However, to ensure a level playing field for access to information it is important for all registered providers designated for the purpose of student support under Section 22 of the Teaching and Higher Education Act 1998 to be subject to the same level of public scrutiny. Schedule 11 to the Bill as currently drafted leaves open what categories of provider should be caught by freedom of information by leaving it to the Secretary of State to specify categories and regulations. If there is the appetite to be more prescriptive, the schedule could adopt the revised new Clause 4A wording as proposed.

Universities are currently subject to the Freedom of Information Act 2000. We propose further consideration be given to whether adherence to the FoI Act should be a condition for initial registration for higher education providers designated for the purpose of student support under Section 22 of the Teaching and Higher Education Act 1998. This new clause would amend the Freedom of Information Act to apply its provisions to all higher education providers designated for the purpose of student support registered with the OfS. This means registered providers eligible for public grant funding and/or access to student loans. I look forward to the Minister’s reply.

--- Later in debate ---

[Viscount Younger of Leckie]

I would be delighted to add that to the letter for clarification. These are complicated aspects that require proper clarification.

To complete my answer to the noble Lord, Lord Liddle, providers, as he would probably guess, will come in the future in many shapes and sizes. A one-size-fits-all approach to regulation risks would impose an unwarranted cost on smaller providers and new entrants that could stifle the positive effects of competition in the sector. The Independent Commission on Freedom of Information, chaired by the noble Lord, Lord Burns, concluded that the current application of the FoI Act is appropriate. It considered evidence that it may place traditional universities at a competitive disadvantage compared with alternative providers and found it unpersuasive.

In addition to comments made by my noble friend Lord Willetts, I thought that the noble Baroness, Lady Brown, put it rather succinctly. That backs up the equivocal aspect of this debate. I believe that there is a balance, and it has been helpful to have this discussion.

Given the importance of information to the effective regulation and scrutiny of higher education providers, we have introduced provisions elsewhere in the Bill to provide a high degree of regulatory oversight and transparency. For example, Clauses 8 and 9 would require the Office for Students to impose ongoing registration conditions on higher education institutions to provide it with the information it requires in order to carry out its functions and to publish specified information.

The noble Lord, Lord Storey, raised a point about information availability and I will attempt to deal with that. Through the Bill, we are making more information available to students than ever before, as I hope he will know. For example, both approved and approved fee cap providers will be subject to the transparency duty in Clause 9, which we discussed earlier in Committee, and the TEF will make much more information available for students. With that, I hope that my noble friend will agree to withdraw his amendment.

[Lord Lucas]

My Lords, I am grateful to my noble friend for that answer, if a little disappointed. As I learned in making my application for information and in going through the tribunal and afterwards, if you allow this difference of treatment, you are effectively saying to all the institutions covered by the Freedom of Information Act that all they need to do is claim “commercial confidentiality” and they will not have to publish anything. Anything that is commercially confidential is information that might affect a student in making a decision about which institution to patronise. Therefore, anything really important and interesting becomes unpublishable, and so the freedom of information registration has no function—except to find out what the vice-chancellor had for breakfast, which is clearly not commercially confidential and therefore we can continue to plague them on that. There is no point in registering institutions for the Freedom of Information Act if you then disapply it on such a large scale by failing to register their competitors. I understand that the Government have reached a decision and I will not trouble them again at Report, but I think that they have gone down the wrong road on this. For now, I beg leave to withdraw my amendment.

Amendment 118 withdrawn.

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Alternatively, might it be possible to do it more flexibly with credits? An element of a course could account for perhaps four credits in a year, and the student would have to pay for a full year’s course, within which they might take only two or three credits. These things do not stack up to a more flexible system. There is no particular model in mind, but I hope the amendments give the Minister the opportunity to respond in a way that might open this up in future. I beg to move.

[Lord Lucas]

Ditto.

[Lord Liddle]

May I add my tuppenceworth in support of the amendments? This seems crucial to the socially progressive innovation in higher education many of us on these Benches would like to see. The truth is that there has not been much attempt to enable people to do courses faster than the standard three or four years. Creating the financial possibility for this to happen would be a very good thing.

Higher Education and Research Bill

Lord Lucas Excerpts

Committee: 3rd sitting (Hansard): House of Lords
Monday 16th January 2017 Lords Chamber

[Lord Lucas (Con)]

A couple of my amendments have washed up in this group. Amendment 192 asks whether the OfS will be able to collaborate with other organisations, for instance, the Times Higher Educational Supplement, which is also involved in rating universities in this way. It seems foolish not to be able to use the work that these organisations have done or, indeed, to share intelligence with them to enable them to do their job better.

The second amendment picks up a point made by my noble friend Lord Willetts. I want the OfS to be able to prompt discussion on the system of degree classification in the UK. The class of degree that people come out with from university matters a lot to them. The line between a 2.1 and 2.2 can have a very big effect on people’s careers. It is not at all clear to me that the system really operates in students’ interests so that someone with a 2.2 should be marked down to the extent they are in terms of employment. We have to have a nationwide conversation on this. Since the universities have not prompted it, the OfS should be able to prompt it. It would be a valuable thing to do. It should not be able to impose an outcome but we ought to have a serious conversation. There are obvious disadvantages in the system we have; I am not saying that I know of a better one but we ought to review it.

[Lord Stevenson of Balmacara (Lab)]

My Lords, this has been a good and useful debate about, as everyone has said, important issues which at the moment are not as well established as they could be in the Bill, so I hope there will be an opportunity to return on Report to get them better organised. I do not think that any one of the amendments in this group, with respect to those who have tabled them, takes the trick. This also has to be interfaced back to what we will decide to do on institutional autonomy, which to some extent is the other side of the same coin.

As the noble Lord, Lord Smith, said, the two contributions from the noble Baronesses, Lady Brown and Lady Warwick, gave us a real insight into the difficulties that will arise if we do not get this right. I do not want to be too critical of the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, who is doing his best to raise a series of interesting questions, but Amendment 192 refers to making arrangements for the rating of the quality and standards of higher education. That is exactly the problem although I agree that the amendment is more subtle in some ways. If we do not approach this with real intelligence about how we use the two terms we will run into difficulty as we go further down the track. That being said, I understand where the noble Lord is coming from. We will probably have to come back to some of the issues that he raises at a future date.

I shall speak briefly to our Amendments 131 and 136. Amendment 131 is an attempt to try to ensure that in a particular part of the Bill, in assessing the quality of higher education providers as a whole—I am not talking about the individual quality; I am falling into my own trap here—there has to be a robust system to get people to a point at which they can be registered as higher education providers. Those systems must include a consideration that the provider has in place appropriate standards that they may apply. I apologise for the typo in the last line of the amendment which should read “providers”.

Amendment 136 tries to give a slightly more detailed interpretation of what a threshold standard is and relates it to,

“a student undertaking a higher education course provided by it, is sufficient to merit the award of a degree or other higher qualification”.

I agree with all noble Lords who have said that the breakdown here is between the sector, which is responsible for the threshold standards, and the necessary quality assessment, which should be done by an external body—it is currently done by the QAA. I also accept, as the noble Lord, Lord Willetts, and others have said, that the QAA has a very important role, which we will be revisiting in relation to establishing the conditions under which a body gets on to the register, therefore becoming a higher education provider, and is eligible for access to student support.

Listening to this debate, I was struck by two things. First was the sense that we are all grouping around a particular area which needs to be unpicked. As I said, no one of these amendments does it exactly, but we know what we are looking for. Secondly, the Government need to signal—if they can—their willingness to look at this again on Report. I welcome what the noble Viscount said in his opening remarks: there will be a statement or a further chance to come in and discuss how we are going to make sure that, as it leaves this place, the Bill has appropriate wording for institutional autonomy, which is at the centre of all we are discussing.

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Moved by

[Lord Lucas]

68: Clause 2, page 2, line 31, at end insert—
“( ) All bodies on which the OfS places responsibility for the execution of its duties shall be open to and governed by all classes of registered higher education providers, and all individual registered higher education providers shall have a role in choosing who on each such body’s board is chosen to be representative of them.”

[Lord Lucas]

My Lords, Amendment 68 seeks to make sure that bodies on which the OfS places responsibility under the Bill are truly representative of all providers, which has not historically been the case for higher education bodies. I beg to move.

[Baroness Goldie (Con)]

My Lords, I expected full-blooded and voluble contributions from all sides of the Committee. I realise that noble Lords are accustomed to the courteous, urbane and patient demeanour of my noble friend Viscount Younger, and I appreciate that my appearance at the Dispatch Box may cause a slight frisson. Let me reassure noble Lords that, while I may not be able to match my noble friend’s skills, I shall do my very best to emulate his virtues.

By way of preface, although not a current, registerable interest, I served for many years on the court of my alma mater, the University of Strathclyde, of which institution I am an honorary fellow. I also spoke regularly in the Scottish Parliament during the passage of the Higher Education Governance (Scotland) Act 2016. I have to say that, in my opinion, that was an unwarranted, intrusive and unnecessary piece of legislation, which I voted against. By comparison with that inedible fodder, this Bill is to me haute cuisine. I realise that some noble Lords may have a different dietary definition, but I think that, in contrast to the position in Scotland, this Bill is trying to offer, frankly, 24-carat gold standard protection for university autonomy.

I turn to the amendment in the name of my noble friend Lord Lucas. I am very sympathetic to the issues raised via this amendment. The OfS will be introducing a new regulatory system that will govern all types of provider, from our longest established universities to those new providers joining the register for the first time. It is essential that the OfS’s systems are fit for purpose and also understand the needs of all types of providers. In operating a single register for all HE providers, the OfS will have a duty to ensure that its regulatory systems, and those involved in running them, fully take account of the diversity of the sector and the full range of different HE providers. This will be a responsibility of the OfS board, which will include representatives of a diverse range of HE provision.

We recognise the need to ensure that any bodies which might be appointed to carry out functions on behalf of the OfS are truly representative of the whole sector. That is why we have made it a mandatory condition of designation for the designated quality and data bodies that they be able to represent a broad range of registered HE providers. This is fundamental, because there can only be meaningful, representative regulation if all parts of the sector are involved. This amendment is therefore not required to embed the principle of sector representation into the working of the OfS via its partner organisations, and I respectfully ask my noble friend Lord Lucas to withdraw his amendment.

[Lord Lucas]

My Lords, I am grateful for the comfort which my noble friend has given me and I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.

Amendment 68 withdrawn.

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Moved by

[Lord Lucas]

89: Clause 8, page 5, line 39, at end insert—
“( ) a condition that requires the governing body of the provider to collaborate with other registered higher education providers and with the OfS in the evaluation of elements of, or proposals for elements of, access and participation plans, and the publication of such evaluations.”

[Lord Lucas]

My Lords, I shall also speak to the other amendments in this group. All have to do with collaboration and my wish that the OfS, in the structure of the Bill, should be able to generate collaboration between universities. The first area, in Amendment 89, is in access plans. Universities spend a lot on encouraging access, but they do not do so in an evidenced or collaborative way. For instance, it was in the papers yesterday, I think, that Oxford is still spending £12 million a year on bursaries, which has been shown to be the least efficient way possible of encouraging access. I have seen several examples of projects which do not have any form of evaluation at the end.

People commonly comment that we do not seem to be generating best practice, learning from it or spreading it. That is a great waste of money, which we are extracting, mostly, from individual students as part of their fees. Now that we are taking control of this process through the OfS, we ought to have much greater stewardship of the money that is being extracted from students, and make sure that it is being spent effectively. To my mind, the OfS should be responsible for making sure that that happens and it does not happen, in my experience, at the moment.

The second area, in Amendment 91, is the GREAT campaign. This was one of the innovations of the 2010 Government and has been, to my mind, a great success in many areas, but it has been half-hearted in knowledge and education. The principal reason for that has been that universities and schools have not collaborated to nearly the extent that they should have. The strong go out and market on their own name; the others are reduced to using agents that the British Council no longer controls properly. Particularly after Brexit, we need a much stronger and more co-ordinated effort to establish the value of British education. I would like to see universities wholeheartedly collaborating with this—and with a degree of compulsion, if my amendment is encouraged—to say that, yes, they all have a role to get students for themselves but they also have a role to promote British education as a whole as they do it, and to collaborate with what we are doing to promote British education.

Amendment 92 requires that the OfS be allowed to communicate with current and former students of providers. If we are to build something worth while out of all the work we are doing in the universities, as a basis for trading worldwide and for our relationships, a modern way of doing that would be through an electronic network. To build such a network, we must have contact with, or a means to communicate with, the people we wish to be members of that network. Yes, of course overseas students who have been to a particular university may well be cultivated by that university, to some extent to extract money from them but also to communicate with them. However, it ought not to be a separate system of 100-plus individual providers—or, if we take all the higher education providers, rather more. We ought to support all our graduates in China as a network of our Chinese graduates, giving them access to similar networks elsewhere in the world and to the network in the UK.

The difficulty with trying to run such a thing over LinkedIn is that you do not know who people are and you do not know who to trust. A network we ran on the basis of who had been to our universities would be much stronger and would have a strong community of values in that everybody in it would have been through the same long experience of receiving a university education in this country. It would form a great basis for international trade over the years, providing strength to us but also to them. Much more than just the education in this country, they would have a lifelong connection with each other and with this country, which would serve them well. To do that, we have to be able to require higher education providers to allow the Government, through the OfS, to communicate with their students; obviously not to extract their details willy-nilly against the Data Protection Act but to require the higher education providers to communicate with their students and say, “The Government would love to involve you in this new network they are building. If you want to join, sign here”. That is an important thing to do. We need somewhere in the Bill the ability to give the OfS the permission to require higher education providers to communicate with their students on behalf of the Government or the OfS.

On Amendment 93, we do not have the information we should on destinations after university. We make attempts to do it; we have a six-month survey, which is sort of complete, and we make various attempts to sample what is happening later in life. We need to do better than that, and for that we need universities’ collaboration. To understand where each university course leads is an important part of informing students what is going on.

Lastly, Amendment 445 picks up the Student Loans Company as a source of ways of communicating with domestic students. That is to some extent an adjunct to the earlier amendments but it is also a proposal made by the Higher Education Policy Institute as a way of improving our student loan recovery from people who have gone to work overseas. They instance the experience of New Zealand as a country that has instituted a similar system and has found that its recovery from graduates who are now overseas has been much better since they have had this kind of access.

I hope the Government will take all these amendments positively, because they lead to positive results. I beg to move.

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[Viscount Younger of Leckie]

My Lords, this group of amendments relates to collaboration across the higher education sector. I thank my noble friend Lord Lucas for highlighting these issues and for allowing this short and interesting debate. I value his knowledge in this area and, should he wish, I would be happy to meet him to discuss these matters further. I reassure him that the Bill does not preclude collaboration on any of these important issues, which I suspect he knows. The Government support collaboration where it is in the best interests of students and where it is not anti-competitive. Furthermore, the OfS has specific duties to promote quality, choice and equality of opportunity. If it considers that promoting collaboration is necessary to achieve these aims, it has the capability to do so.

I will take each of my noble friend’s amendments in turn. He draws attention to the importance of collaboration to evaluate access and participation proposals. I reassure the House that the Government absolutely agree with the importance of widening participation, which will be a key part of the remit of the Office for Students. The new Director for Fair Access and Participation will be at the heart of the new regulator and will sit on the board. This reflects the high priority that this Government are giving to widening participation. The OfS will be able to use the information it gathers from access and participation plans and through working with higher education institutions and sector bodies to evaluate what works in widening participation, building on the good work already done by OFFA.

My noble friend also raised the need for collaboration between providers to attract international students to the UK. He mentioned the well-received GREAT campaign, which does an excellent job. The Government acknowledge that, as well as competing for individual students, the higher education sector has a shared interest in promoting the excellent education provided by our universities to prospective international students. Various sector bodies and mission groups already do an excellent job in promoting UK universities on the global stage and there are many instances of successful collaboration between providers. Furthermore, as the noble Baroness, Lady Brown, rightly pointed out, the British Council also plays an importance role in this respect.

The third issue raised by these amendments is the importance of greater collaboration to enable more effective communication with current and former students. Many universities already run effective alumni programmes. There are also a number of existing routes to communicate with current and former students, such as through the Student Loans Company—as my noble friend Lord Willetts said—and we expect the OfS to work in partnership to deliver effective communications.

The fourth issue is collaborating to keep track of former students’ locations and employment statuses. The Government appreciate the importance of monitoring the long-term outcomes for students finishing higher education. It is very much an important part of our reforms. The OfS will work with the designated data body and others to ensure appropriate data gathering. As your Lordships will know, there is already a graduate destination survey and we are developing the longitudinal education outcomes data.

I turn now to Amendment 445. As my noble friend Lord Lucas will be aware, the Student Loans Company administers student loan accounts in the UK. I am happy to reassure my noble friend that the SLC already shares information with other government departments where this is of assistance in recovering student loan debt. The Government also published the joint repayment strategy in February last year, which provides more detail of the work under way in this area. We do not believe that this amendment is necessary, given that other frameworks are in place for the SLC to share information where this is of assistance in recovering student loan debt. I thank my noble friend for allowing me to give, I hope, some reassurance to him on all his amendments and I ask him to withdraw this amendment.

[Lord Lucas]

My Lords, I am grateful to my noble friend for his answer and I will certainly take him up on his offer of a meeting between Committee and Report. To reply briefly to the noble Baroness, Lady Brown of Cambridge, I say that Cambridge is part of the United Kingdom as well as being a university with commercial interests and there are some things that one does because they are of interest to us all rather than just the interest of oneself. Responding to the need to boost the economy abroad, boost trade and improve our international relationships, we can all act as individual actors and say we will reserve to ourselves all our knowledge and skills or we can share them. This is a time when a certain degree of sharing is necessary and Cambridge and others should recognise that though they are grand and important and have great reputations they consequently have a great ability to contribute to the nation through sharing.

As far as my noble friend Lord Willetts’s remarks are concerned, we have just given the National Citizen Service the right to require HMRC to communicate with its customers on behalf of the National Citizen Service, so the precedent for allowing the Inland Revenue to send out messages has been established. We really ought to open up the Student Loans Company in the same way because we must surely be able to make great use of that kind of communication with the alumni of British universities. It is just communication. It is just sending out information. I will look further into the proposition that we do not need any help in improving our loan recovery rate from overseas students and I will incorporate that in my conversations with the Minister when we get there, but for now I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.

Amendment 89 withdrawn.

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Moved by

[Lord Lucas]

94: Clause 9, page 6, line 3, leave out “of a prescribed description”

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[Lord Lucas]

My Lords, I am afraid the Committee will get tired of hearing from me on this. This is all about information and Amendment 101, which would give the OfS the power to specify after consultation additional matters in which it thinks should require information, is perhaps the key amendment. It would give the OfS and the Government plenty of time for consultation and consideration before going down any of the routes I advocate in other amendments.

Amendment 94 picks up “of a prescribed description”. My experience in this area is that if you have differential requirements for information, anyone required to provide less information has an immediate commercial advantage and the people being asked for more information raise their hands and say, “We’re being asked to put ourselves at a commercial disadvantage”. This creates great problems. Everybody should be asked for the same information and then there is a level playing field.

Amendments 95 to 98 pick up the first of several areas in which the current practice of UCAS and universities greatly advantages well-off schools. There are a number of bits of knowledge that are not publicly released and not easily available but which schools with sufficient funds to research and preserve knowledge efficiently from one year to the next can use to advantage their students. One area is the month in which it is best to apply to a particular university course. It is supposed to be all the same but it is not. There are particular courses where applying early can raise an advantage; that should be known by everybody, not just by a few.

Amendment 99 is one of a number that ask for information from providers to allow the rest of us to understand what they are doing and to enter into an informed conversation with them about whether we might like things to be different. My particular interest in this area is with sexual harassment. I want to know what universities are doing to improve the situation they find themselves with—making sure that freshers’ week is civilised and that the relationship between the genders in university is properly respectful and understood to be so; and that all those who come to university with bad attitudes learned from schools that are not well organised and well set-up in terms of relationships between the genders have an opportunity to learn a proper way of going about things. The evidence on this is mostly from the United States, where it appears that about 40% of male students arrive at university with exceptionally disrespectful ideas of how to treat female students. I do not know the figures here but I imagine that they are not wildly different.

The recent work very courageously done by Imperial College on sexual harassment and gender relationships reveals that there is a lot of work to be done. There is scope for great improvement here. This amendment would apply also to such matters as anti-Semitism and homophobia and other aspects of the relationship between the members of the university community. The purpose of this amendment is to make sure that we get to a position where higher education providers regularly release information that is of use to prospective students but also to others concerned that we should see improving practice over time. Amendment 100 reflects that in the case of mental health.

Amendment 102 reflects it in the case of freedom of speech and academic freedom—not to give the OfS or anybody else the power to intervene but to make sure that we know what is going on so that we can be part of a conversation with academia about what should be done.

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[Baroness Goldie]

I hope that the noble Lord will permit me to respond to him in greater detail by writing to him.

[Lord Lucas]

My Lords, I am very grateful to my noble friend for her offer of a meeting. Of course, if any other noble Lord wants to attend that meeting, I should be delighted if they would let me know and I will make sure that that happens. For now, I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.

Amendment 94 withdrawn.