Higher Education: Reform

Lord Smith of Clifton Excerpts

Monday 12th November 2012 Lords Chamber

[Lord Smith of Clifton]

My Lords, the debate could not be better timed and I congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Wills, on initiating it. The introduction by the coalition of a threefold increase in university tuition fees has led, as other noble Lords said, to a plummeting of applications by part-time students. Yesterday, the Observer reported significant falls in applications among middle-class families, citing the well heeled parliamentary constituencies of Banbury, Tatton and Witney as examples. In a three-page article in the same issue, the Observer analysed the prospects for the survival of the university system as we know it, in view of the exponential explosion in the provision of online distance learning courses. Students will be increasingly attracted by such lower-cost courses. Following the Browne report, the coalition hiked up fees to encourage the privatisation of higher education and make it much more market led, which will continue to have enormous reverberations.

Tomorrow, as has been mentioned, the newly formed Council for the Defence of British Universities holds its inaugural meeting. Like many of your Lordships, I am a founding member and declare my interest. The CDBU has been set up to monitor the effects of coalition policy on the HE sector, many of which seem deleterious. The STEM subjects need to be encouraged and the Government have provided funds for them—but leaving the arts, social sciences, law and particularly the performing and plastic arts to fend for themselves in a world of untrammelled market forces will lead to an imbalance among the academic disciplines that will certainly change the system of higher education. It is these trends that the CDBU will keep under continuous review.

Of course, change is inevitable and diversity is to be welcomed, but it needs to come about within a coherent framework that necessarily involves the Government. On a number of occasions in the House, I have advocated the introduction of a three-tier scheme for higher education along the lines pioneered by Clark Kerr in California. I was very gratified to see that it had been endorsed and elaborated on by the noble lord, Lord Rees of Ludlow. It is gratifying to have such an authoritative recommendation from so eminent a source.

At a time of austerity and scarce resources, it is imperative that this country has a robust system of higher education. Since the Robbins report of 1963, no wide-scale review has been undertaken. A successor to Robbins is long overdue. Leaving the system to market forces will lead to gaps in the range of disciplines in Britain. National criteria need to be devised and deployed of the kind used by the noble Lord, Lord Oxburgh, in his planned reduction of the provision of geology in the 1980s.

Finally, I turn to the possible unintended consequences of the recent Finch report on open access to the results of research and scholarship. The mandatory dissemination of the results of research and scholarship funded by UK taxpayers will of course offer free research and development to overseas competitors.

Secondly, the so-called article processing charge being levied by academic publishers on contributors will seriously handicap younger academics who can ill afford the upfront charges of up to $3,000. Those and other reservations have been raised by learned societies such as the Political Studies Association, of which I declare an interest as a vice-president. Will Her Majesty’s Government address those worrying concerns, which impact particularly on the arts and social sciences?

In winding, I ask: does the coalition propose to appoint a Robbins-type inquiry; will Her Majesty’s Government get a resolution to the contradictory policies of the Department for Business, Industry and Skills and the Home Office over student visas; and will they look carefully at the deleterious effects of the Finch report?