Higher Education and Research Bill

Debate between Lord Lucas and Lord Lipsey

Report: 2nd sitting (Hansard): House of Lords
Wednesday 8th March 2017 Lords Chamber

[Lord Lipsey (Lab)]

My Lords, I shall speak to Amendment 69 on the National Student Survey and Amendment 67 on postponing by a year the ability of TEF rankings to affect the fees universities can charge. Noble Lords will be relieved to hear that I will not repeat the longish and geekish speech I made in Committee on the National Student Survey. I look forward to hearing from the noble Lord, Lord Bew—a man whose expertise in this field no one in the House will doubt—putting the main arguments forward. However, the House ought to be updated on two recent developments that bear on the validity of the NSS.

First, there is the letter of 23 February from Ed Humpherson, the director-general for regulation at the UK Statistics Authority, to the DfE, responding to concerns raised with that authority on the NSS. It is a letter that needs a little reading between the lines, but in summary it refers approvingly to what Ministers have done to downgrade the NSS in the TEF. I will come back to that in a minute. It tells the department it must address the recommendations in the ONS report of June 2016 on the NSS and of the Royal Statistical Society in July 2016. Why do I draw attention to those two documents? They are the fundamental and official documents on which the critics of the NSS rest their case. They also take reading between the lines, but when this is done they are excoriating critiques.

Secondly, there is the question of benchmarking. Those reports and everyone who has addressed this subject agree that you cannot use the TEF for direct comparison between institutions. You simply cannot use it to compare the Royal College of Music and Trinity Laban—the two conservatoires that my noble friend Lord Winston and I have the honour of chairing—with Kingston University or any other I could mention. Instead, we are supposed to use benchmarking, which means comparing similar institutions.

Benchmarking raises its own set of statistical questions, which I will spare the House, so the Government decided that they needed an independent report on benchmarking and its statistical difficulties. What does that report say? It says nothing. Why does it say nothing? It is because it does not exist. Why does it not exist? It is because the Higher Education Statistics Agency, which admits this perfectly freely, has failed to commission it. It has been very difficult to get anyone to take it on. The pillar that bears the NSS in the TEF may be of solid oak, or it may be completely rotten. Without that study we have no idea.

The amendment I am speaking to calls for an inquiry into the NSS. I am delighted by all the concessions that the Government have made on the NSS in the TEF—although I should not call them “concessions”; they have given way to reason on these subjects—including its official downgrading to the least important metric, the admission of its shortcomings for small institutions, the one-year postponement of the subject TEF and the lessons-learned exercise. All those are sensible and welcome concessions from the Government. However, they mandate one further concession. It would be a self-inflicted blunder by the Government now to go ahead and let the TEF stop some universities’ raising fees on the original timetable until and unless that lessons-learned exercise has been completed and, indeed, the study that was supposed to have been commissioned by the Higher Education Statistics Agency has been commissioned.

We have been jumping in the dark into a pit whose depth we do not know. I want, and most noble Lords want, the TEF to work, but a rushed TEF, littered with statistical errors, will not work. If Ministers want the TEF to last—they do, and I do—they need a measured timetable for its introduction. They need to give it time to bed down. Otherwise, the flaws that I and others have been pointing to in this debate will turn from glints in the eyes of the geeks to real-world inadequacies and perhaps in some cases will even threaten the existence of the institutions that lose out as a result of those flaws. That would undermine the legitimacy of the whole scheme.

I beg the Minister, who has made so much progress with this Bill, not to concede, at the last minute, an own goal which may mean that what could have been a reasonable victory turns into a dreadful loss.

[Lord Lucas (Con)]

My Lords, I shall speak to my Amendment 68 in this group. I support very much what my noble friend the Duke of Wellington has said. I think he has an elegant approach in his amendment. Mine is different but we have the same concern. I am sure there are exceptions, but by and large this House wants the TEF to succeed. We want students to have more and better information on the quality and style of teaching than they have at the moment. We want universities and other higher education institutions to be motivated to improve the quality of their teaching.

We have some severe worries about the present quality of information, but let us set out and see what we can do over the next few years to improve it. After all, universities are supposed to be good at that sort of thing and, as we said, we have Chris Husbands in charge of the process. That gives me a good deal of hope and confidence. However, we cannot, on the basis of an unreformed, much criticised, hardly understood set of measures, leap into giving universities gold, silver and bronze metrics. If we give a university a bronze measure, the likelihood is that it will be struck off the list in those countries where students are centrally funded, such as the Gulf states. We will cause severe problems to students in countries where face is important, such as those in the Far East, who will have to say to their friends, “I am going to a bronze-rated university”. Bronze will be seen as failing because these universities will be marked out as the bottom 20%.

This is just not necessary. We have succeeded, in our research rankings, in producing a measure of sufficient detail and sophistication for people to read it in detail. It produces quite marked differences between institutions, but nobody reads it as a mark of a failing institution. It is information, not ranking, which is why I come back to my noble friend’s amendment as being a useful way of approaching this.

Higher Education and Research Bill

Debate between Lord Lucas and Lord Lipsey

Committee: 1st sitting (Hansard - continued): House of Lords
Monday 9th January 2017 Lords Chamber

[Lord Lipsey (Lab)]

My Lords, I chair Trinity Laban Conservatoire of Music and Dance, which is part of the university sector. I feel, rising at this stage, a bit like an actor rising to play the porter in “Macbeth”. There have been hours of drama and extraordinary debate about matters of deep principle. I have to make a speech, if I can, that at the same time is amusing but makes a serious point. I am supposed to do it when three-quarters drunk. Unfortunately, I am not three-quarters drunk—there was not time during the dinner break to get that way—so I hope your Lordships will forgive me if I try to square this circle as the porter did.

A well-reputed blog of the higher education sector called, even more peculiarly than the office, Wonkhe, this morning said that there was no chance that the House of Lords would accept this amendment because the resulting body would be called OfHE. I must say that I thought that that was quite a strong argument for the name that I was proposing because “offie” is somewhere you really want to go down to—“go and buy a bottle from the offie”—whereas going for a meeting at the Office for Students sounds extraordinarily tedious and dull. However, it is not on that that I am relying in going for a change of name.

I say “going for a change of name” because I am not convinced that the name that I propose is in every regard absolutely perfect. It could be said that there are many things in higher education that lie outside the field of the OfS and there are certainly some things that lie within it—so I do not guarantee that the alternative that I proffer this evening, Office for Higher Education, is absolutely perfect. All I would say is that it is a great deal more perfect than the option that the Government have presented us with: OfS. I have no idea where “OfS” came from. I envisage in my “Yes Minister” mind a meeting with a special adviser there who said, “Yes, Minister, we could call it anything you like, but we did jolly badly in those university towns at the last election. OfS, so we appear to be on the side of students, would be a good title”—and these things tend to stick.

But the name is clearly inappropriate because much of what it is planned that OfS shall do has very little to do with students. Is registering universities a job for the OfS? Is removing the title from certain universities done in the interest of students? Is fee setting done in the interest of students? Actually, if you come to think of it, the strongest opponents of the Bill have been students, who are now trying to engineer a revolt against the teaching excellence framework. So if we must use this sort of title, perhaps it would be better to call it the Office against Students—which is the effect that I expect this Bill to have; I expect it not to be a successful Bill from the point of view of furthering the student interest.

More seriously, we have to be very careful before importing into our legislation titles which serve a propaganda purpose—who can be against OfS, against students or, in America, against patriots? Before long, we find that the whole of political language has ceased to be neutral in legislation and is starting to slip off into a language from the post-truth era where the titles of things no longer represent their reality but rather a sort of Orwellian other world in which things no longer mean what they are supposed to mean. Such propaganda reasons are not good reasons for the title of an institution.

At this time of night I do not want to detain the Committee further; this is a probing amendment to see whether the Government are at all interested in finding a better name. In the meantime, I will offer unconditionally to any Member of the House who can come up with a better title than I have—Office for Higher Education—a bottle of champagne, provided they can at the same time convince the Minister to accept it. I beg to move.

[Lord Lucas (Con)]

My Lords, I am a student activist in these things. If we are going to change the title, let us just call it OFFS. That is a suitable acronym. I am sure the noble Lord, Lord Lipsey, knows it well. His would be “Ofhed”, and I think the Minister would be that if he accepted the amendment.