Viscount Hanworth
Main Page: Viscount Hanworth (Labour - Excepted Hereditary)
Viscount Hanworth
My Lords, reform is a weasel word. It commonly denotes the removal of abuses and malpractices, the enhancement of efficiency, the defeat of vested interests and much else besides. Successive Governments have used the word as an accompaniment of coercive attempts to gain power and to exercise control over organisations or groups of people who serve specialised functions in society and who depend on government funding.
The university sector is faced at present with major reforms that entail an attack on the professional status of academics and a belittlement of their capabilities. Under such specious slogans as “students at the heart of the system” and “putting students in the driving seat”, proposals are being made to accompany a radical change in the way that universities are financed.
Those who will have to pay more for their education are being mollified by the thought that universities will be forced to improve the quality of their provision in accordance with the increased fees. The ideological imperative of the reforms is ostensibly to create a market in higher education in which students as consumers will face universities as producers in a competitive struggle. A concealed objective is that of reinforcing the privileges of a select group of universities, described as the top institutions, which also serve the educational needs of a social elite. Universities of the middle ground will be hollowed out and, at the lower end, entrants will be allowed to participate in the competition.
Successive reforms by Governments have imposed a heavy burden of quality control and performance assessment on university lecturers. The burden has accumulated. Nowadays, vastly inflated parallel organisations exist within universities that instruct lecturers how to conduct their business, that investigate their work via peer appraisals and student assessments and that demand detailed documentation of the taught courses in respect of their objectives, their content and their methods.
One might reasonably expect there to be strong resistance on the part of the majority of the academics to those impositions, as well as a modicum of success in resisting them. However, academics have lost the power to resist and, nowadays, they are outnumbered by administrators. The loss of power has been hastened by the fact that a declining proportion of academic staff is native to the UK. For many years, our universities have failed to generate native academics to succeed those who retire. The new recruits lack the sense of ownership that one would expect of native British academics; and there is an acute sense of impermanency in many departments, where the annual rates of staff turnover can be as high as 30 per cent.
The proposals that have been set forth in the White Paper, Students at the Heart of the System, can only exacerbate the problems that I am describing. It is proposed to enhance students’ experiences by making universities more responsive to their demands and complaints. Student appraisal of individual courses is to play a major role, as is the National Student Survey, which records the overall degree of student satisfaction with the departments in which they have been taught. We are told that there will be a new focus on student charters, student feedback and graduate outcomes. By graduate outcomes is meant the success of graduates in achieving well remunerated employment; and the competitive evaluation of comparable courses will depend crucially on this.
The pursuit of student satisfaction has already led to an inordinate grade inflation in higher education; and this development is subverting the didactic process. An ignorance of the real criteria of excellence is of no benefit to the student.
In the commercially competitive environment that is envisaged by the White Paper, in which university administrators are in control of the academic processes, the opinions and demands of students are liable to dictate what is taught and how it is taught. Indeed, this has already happened and to the severe detriment of quality.