Higher Education and Research Bill

Viscount Hanworth Excerpts

2nd reading (Hansard): House of Lords
Tuesday 6th December 2016 Lords Chamber

[Viscount Hanworth (Lab)]

My Lords, I begin by declaring that I have spent my working life as an academic in British universities.

The objective of the Higher Education and Research Bill is to further the marketisation of higher education and to increase competition within the sector. Universities have traditionally undertaken functions and have operated in ways that no competitive profit-seeking organisation would consider. They have co-operated widely across the sector in maintaining the quality of their teaching and the uniformity of their standards of assessment. Many of their activities have been predicated upon a degree of cross-subsidisation that no commercial organisation would tolerate. Latterly, technical and scientific departments of multifaculty universities have been heavily subsidised by departments of arts, humanities and social sciences that have much lower costs and are able to attract students more readily. Such subsidies are now subject to severe limitations in consequence of the commercial priorities that are becoming increasingly dominant in universities.

STEM subjects and the departments that teach them are under threat, as are minority arts and humanities subjects. It is notable that these developments have been a consequence of government interventions and initiatives. In almost every aspect, they have been dysfunctional. It is hardly worth while recounting the litany of ill effects, but it might be appropriate to give one typical example of a harmful intervention. It concerns the effects of the quality assurance regimes upon the system of external examining, an arrangement whereby specialists from other universities are asked to scrutinise examination papers, to monitor and participate in the marking of scripts, and to oversee the awarding of degrees. The effect has been both to assure the quality of teaching in individual courses and to assure universality of standards among universities in the awarding of degrees.

Traditionally, external examiners have been enjoined to be unbridled in their criticisms of any deficiencies they might perceive, with the assurance that both they and the department would be protected by anonymity, or at least confidentiality. With the advent of the quality assurance regimes that have been wished upon universities by the Government, there has been a requirement to publish the external examiners’ findings. Almost all academic departments have resorted to preliminary internal examiners’ meetings, wherein any potential embarrassments are discovered and concealed from the external examiners, who now attend only the subsequent formal examiners’ meetings. A further consequence has been the practice of the quality assurance offices imposing upon the external examiners to remove from their reports even the mildest of criticisms in order that the published reports should be entirely positive. In an era in which co-operation among institutions is being replaced by competition, it seems that the role of external examiners is no longer viable.

The Higher Education and Research Bill makes it clear that the Government are not concerned with preserving uniformity of teaching quality and of standards of accreditation throughout the university sector. It is proposed that universities should be graded in respect of their putative teaching quality, for which they should be awarded a gold, silver or bronze star. It is extraordinary that anyone should consider summarising the performance of an entire multi-faculty university in this way. Moreover, the effect of being classified as a third-class or bronze-star university is liable to be both unjust and disastrous. The likelihood is that it will drive away applicants and lead to the bankruptcy of the institution.

Another highly deleterious proposal is that commercial start-up institutions should be granted their degree-awarding powers at their inception. In the past, newly established institutions of higher education had to remain under the tutelage of an existing and well-established university for a number of years. During this time, their degrees were awarded as external degrees of the sponsoring university, until full autonomy was granted. Now it is proposed that a newly established Office for Students should be responsible for granting or withdrawing the degree-awarding powers. The reasoning is that such an arrangement is necessary to avoid conflicts of interest between the start-up institution and the sponsoring university, with which it is envisaged to be in competition. Here again, we see the nostrums of competition obstructing co-operation.

The experience of start-up universities in the United States should serve as a warning of what will transpire if the Government pursue the policies outlined in the Bill. The institutions in question, which rarely deserve the title of a university, have been commercial enterprises aimed at providing the courses that are the cheapest and most profitable. They have shown a tendency to fail and to go out of business in quick time. This has left a large body of aggrieved students with heavy debts and worthless qualifications that no one is prepared to recognise. The failed Trump University is a prominent case in point. It is difficult to understand why the present Government should wish to replicate these circumstances in the UK.

I distrust this Government’s approach to the university sector, on account of both the deficiencies of their understanding and their ulterior motives. It is clear that one of the Government’s motives is to arrogate to themselves unprecedented powers to control the running of the university sector.

The teaching excellence framework, which is to be the means of assessing the performance of universities, will be based on metrics that are wholly unfit for the purpose. It will depend heavily on scores of student satisfaction, which are formed in isolation and without reference to what transpires in other institutions. These cannot be used as a standard of comparison. Indeed, it has been found that the scores are inversely related to the level of difficulty of the subjects taught and to the vigour with which they are taught. The focus on aspects such as graduate employment destinations, which are beyond the universities’ control, is a further distortion. The sooner this utter nonsense is halted, the better.

Education: Contribution to Economic Growth

Viscount Hanworth Excerpts

Thursday 5th December 2013 Lords Chamber

[Viscount Hanworth (Lab)]

My Lords, I begin by expressing my dismay at the obtuseness of many of the analyses that attempt to quantify the economic benefits of increased expenditure on our education. Such studies are well represented in the literature emanating from the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills. They are typically cast in the form of economic cost/benefit analyses. The costs are expenditures, both public and private, that are entailed in seeing an individual through the ultimate stages of their education. The benefits are in the form of a discounted flow of cash representing the present value of the individual’s enhanced lifetime earnings. The balance is termed a net lifetime benefit, and the sum of individual benefits, aggregated over the set of people in question, is deemed to be the net economic benefit. There is an implicit suggestion here that the per capita net benefit thus derived is a meaningful measure of the returns to be expected from a marginal increase in the expenditure on a particular form of education. It is suggested that this should provide the appropriate guidance for governmental educational policies.

We should, of course, expect much more from education than the individual financial rewards that it might generate. The economic benefits of an educated working population surely extend far beyond the realm of personal finances. This is notwithstanding the fact that, in economic accountancy, it is deemed to be appropriate to measure all benefits in terms of the eventual increases in the incomes of consumers.

We also have to contend with what economists describe as the problem of externalities; economic benefits and the other effects of the education of individuals accrue not only to themselves but also to others. The problem of externalities is commonly known as the fallacy of composition. The fallacy arises when the whole of something cannot be identified with the sum of its parts.

There is another more fundamental methodological criticism that I should like to aim at the studies that I have mentioned. The studies that purport to account for the levels of personal or national income commonly employ regression analyses. These attribute the value of a dependent variable, which is income in these cases, to a linear combination of various measurable factors, which are weighted by numerical coefficients. There is an unspoken assumption that these factors are amenable to independent variation, achieved perhaps by the intercession of some governmental policy. Thus, for example, it is asserted in one of the documents of the Department of Business Innovation and Skills, that,

“a 16 percentage point increase in those educated to degree level could lead to more than £1bn annual savings in reduced crime costs in the UK”.

That is an instance of what is described in philosophical jargon as a counterfactual conditional. It is a statement that asserts that if realities were other than what they actually are, then such-and-such a consequence would ensue. The difficulty here is in the need to invent a plausible alternative reality. The alternative reality would comprise not only the 16% increase in the numbers of graduates; there would be many other accompanying circumstances. There could plausibly be an increase in the unemployment of the graduates, which might lead them to commit crimes. If this speculation sounds silly, it is no sillier than the original proposition.

There are many other instances that could be cited of spurious quantification expressed in quasi-mathematical language. They are certain to bamboozle many readers who lack the confidence to gainsay them. An example of dubious quantification that is dominating the current debate on educational policy is the list of the so-called PISA rankings on national educational achievements that has been published by the OECD in recent days. The Education Secretary, Michael Gove, has been using these rankings to berate his predecessors and his critics. On closer examination, the PISA methodology appears to be seriously flawed. However, a cursory glance at the rankings indicates that they are, to a significant extent, inversely correlated with the degrees of inequality in the countries concerned.

If this is not the way to guide and to evaluate our educational policies, then what other methods should we pursue? I propose that we should take a narrative approach, which should be informed by a detailed knowledge of past and present circumstances. This would dwell on past successes and failures. We should allow ourselves some modest self-congratulation, but the principal aim should be that of avoiding the pitfalls already encountered and of overcoming the enduring failures. This is far too big a task to attempt in a brief speech, but I can at least talk briefly of some of my own perceptions.

I believe that we must go back at least to the Butler Education Act of 1944 in order to explain the current status of education in Britain. The Butler Act proposed three different types of secondary school: grammar schools, secondary technical schools and secondary modern schools. The technical schools were intended to foster the scientific and technical education that would sustain our industries, thereby enhancing our economic growth. However, they never materialised. This was partly on account of a lack of resources and a lack of teachers who had skills in the relevant areas. The technical schools were also opposed by some trade unionists who felt that they would encroach on the apprentice system.

Within this tripartite system, there was an order of merit. Grammar schools, which were to have an academic orientation, would take the brightest of the students; secondary technical schools were to take those of middling ability; and secondary modern schools were to take those who by and large were destined for menial industrial labour. As it transpired, there was no provision in the middle ground for training that was both academic and technical. The legacy of that deficiency has endured to this day. In particular, we have no meaningful system of technical apprenticeships. We seem nowadays to be intent on using a revived system of apprenticeships mainly to obtain placements for young people who might otherwise be unemployed. The reaction of the Labour Party to the socially divisive system of grammar and secondary modern schools was to create comprehensive schools to cater to all students together. However, the comprehensive schools have never satisfied the need for a technical education,

The philosophy of outsourcing that has been adopted by many British companies has led them to regard technical skills as commodities that can be purchased on the open market. They have failed to train and nurture people with the skills that they depend upon, and consequently in many cases the firms have rendered themselves technically incompetent. The problem was well illustrated in the speech of the noble Baroness, Lady Sharp.

At this juncture, I remark that British culture has fostered some decidedly anti-intellectual sentiments. In certain quarters there has been contempt for teachers. There are echoes of such contempt in the pronouncements of the current Secretary of State for Education. Michael Gove has threatened a more rigorous system of school inspections that will weed out incompetent and underperforming teachers. He has also proposed to give head teachers and school governors arbitrary and unbridled powers to determine the remuneration of their staff. It seems that the visitations of the Ofsted inspection regime are to be redoubled at a time when teachers are liable to be afflicted by a plethora of governmental educational initiatives. It is such interference by successive Governments and the derogation of the teachers’ skills that has been responsible for many of the problems in the educational sector.

People work best when they have ownership of the processes that they mediate and when they are able to maintain their self-respect. Under such circumstances, they are liable to work with enthusiasm and to perform beyond the formal call of duty. It is remarkable that our teachers have been so steadfast in the face of so many onslaughts.