Higher Education and Research Act 2017 (Consequential, Transitional, Transitory and Saving Provisions) Regulations 2018
Debate between Viscount Hanworth and Lord Judd
Viscount Hanworth (Lab)
My Lords, the scrutiny of these regulations, which are consequential on the Higher Education and Research Act 2017, provides an opportunity to take another look at the developments in the governance of UK universities and to consider where they are taking us. The education Act of 2017 encapsulated a modern view of the purpose of universities that is greatly at variance with a conception that prevailed for most of the 20th century. In the traditional view, which accompanied the expansion of universities that began in the 1960s, universities’ purpose was to create an educated population and to give it full access to our cultural and intellectual heritage, with no limit initially on the number of participants. Anyone who was capable of profiting from a university education should have been able to do so.
Nowadays, it is generally agreed among members of the Government and senior management of universities that universities should be regarded as institutions for training the workforce and for making discoveries for pursuing developments that might stimulate economic growth. The universities Act of 2017 attempted to direct the activities of universities to these ends via a plethora of regulations and initiatives that fall under three headings: the research excellence framework, the REF; the teaching excellence framework, the TEF; and latterly the knowledge exchange framework, the KEF. Work is under way to develop metrics to enable the Government to judge the successes and failures of institutions in each of these three areas and to award the available funds to support their activities accordingly. There has been a hypertrophy of university administration, which has arisen largely to service the demands of Governments. In most institutions, administrators now outnumber the academic staff.
The declared objectives of Governments have been mutually antagonistic and largely counterproductive. To recruit sufficient numbers of students in the increasingly competitive open market environment created by the present Government, UK universities are indulging in what has been described as an amenities arms race. They have been spending exorbitantly on student union buildings, swimming pools, sports centres and student accommodation. Things have had to give way to enable these developments. The university to which I am affiliated as an emeritus professor has declared the objective of reducing its salary bill by 20% to provide the funds for capital investments.
It is clear that there has been a conflict of objectives in the context of the teaching excellence framework. The assessments are based largely on measures of customer satisfaction. The provision of student amenities is liable to enhance this satisfaction. The reduction in the numbers of permanent teaching staff and their replacement by casualised teachers has provided some of the necessary funds. The casual workers are mainly drawn from among the postgraduate students but they include a growing number of post-doctoral teaching fellows on temporary contracts. This is bound to affect the quality of the teaching.
The research excellence framework involves a quinquennial competition among university departments to determine where they should be ranked in terms of their research output. Once more, the effect has been dysfunctional. These assessments are based on a so-called peer review by senior academics. Departments can guess what sort of research will be most favoured by closely examining the adjudicators’ research output. Innovative research and interdisciplinary research in particular tend to be discouraged.
The principal effect of the research excellence framework has been to compel academics to maximise their published output. They have learned to write several papers for the price of one good idea by contriving never completely to finish a research paper. In this way, there will be something left over on which to base a subsequent paper. A small voice used to remind me, whenever I became enthused by the prospect of a new research avenue of enquiry, that I could not afford to indulge in speculative research. My mission instead was to write papers. Only when I had produced a sufficient number of papers was I free to pursue the research.
The research excellence framework has also militated against the objective of doing applied research of a sort that might lead to industrial innovation. Such research is liable to be sponsored, in part, by an industrial enterprise. For that reason, it is often subject to industrial secrecy. An academic who seeks promotion through the excellence of their publications would be advised to steer away from such applied research, which might not see the light of day for many years. This is one way in which the research excellence framework comes into direct conflict with the objectives of the knowledge exchange framework, which aims to encourage the practical application of academic research. One cannot impose these contradictory requirements upon academics without driving them to despair. Nor can academics evade these demands, which are being placed upon them at the behest of the Government by university administrators. Vast amounts of time are liable to be spent in meeting the demands of the various assessment exercises, to the detriment of teaching, research and the transfer of knowledge.
The mantra of the present Government is to induce market competition into the university environment. University life is already very competitive. Hitherto the competition has been largely academic. Now there is intense competition to win research grants, since their acquisition is liable to be an important factor in achieving promotion. A young statistician in my department was able to make rapid headway on the basis of a grant from the Medical Research Council to pursue a very ordinary epidemiological investigation, which would not have incited any interest among his more cerebral colleagues. His preferment created intense jealously. Maybe that is too personal a story to dwell upon, but there is a point to be made. Applied research of this nature is best conduced in research establishments that are devoted to the relevant lines of inquiry, be they in medicine, pharmacology, telecommunications, aviation or whatever.
Britain was once endowed with many splendid research establishments within the public sector. These had strong relationships with universities, as well as with industry. Many of them were abolished in the 1970s and 1980s. It is wrong to expect universities to fill the gap that has been left, which is what the knowledge exchange framework is intended to force them to do.
I believe that the Government’s policies towards our universities are self-defeating. They are liable greatly to diminish the quality of our universities and their status in the world of learning.
Lord Judd
My Lords, I am very glad that I gave way to my noble friend because that was a very important speech. By the same token, I applaud my noble friend Lord Hunt’s speech. He reflected my own misgivings very powerfully. I should declare an interest because I have been, over many years, involved, and still remain involved, in the governance, in the widest sense, of some of our university institutions.
We applaud the standing of British universities. We cannot reflect enough on how that standing and admiration across the world has been achieved. It has certainly not been achieved with the language of “providers”, or of “customers” instead of “students”. In other words, it has not been involved in the context of an overriding commitment to market ideology. It has been achieved because of a long-standing and continuing commitment to scholarship, to learning and to the concept of the value of education as an end in itself, not as a means to an immediate end.
Infrastructure Bill [HL]
Debate between Viscount Hanworth and Lord Judd(9 years, 9 months ago)
Grand CommitteeRead Full debate Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
Viscount Hanworth (Lab)
My Lords, I wish to lend strong support to Amendment 56 in the name of my noble friend Lord Berkeley. In the phraseology of the Labour Party, paragraph (b) in his amendment contains an injunction to think in a joined-up manner and to envisage road and rail as parts of an integrated transport system.
The perspectives from which our party views matters of transport policy differ greatly from those of the Conservatives. We envisage an integrated system. The Conservatives, by contrast, tend to place road and rail in quite different categories. The railways were regarded by them as a prime example of a loss-making nationalised industry that required to be privatised. The roads have been regarded as a means whereby our citizens have been able to exercise a fundamental liberty to come and go as they please throughout the land, and for this the road users have been heavily subsidised.
The consequence of this dichotomy—or should I call it a schism?—has been a failure to envisage how these different modes of transport might interact or have a clear idea of their relative advantages. For example, the damage inflicted on the roads by HGVs has not been properly taken into account, and therefore the benefits of transferring road freight to the rails have been largely ignored.
We have before us an Infrastructure Bill that is liable to make joined-up thinking in respect of our transport system even more difficult to achieve. By putting the strategic highways company at arm’s length from the ministry, it will be out of mind and out of sight as far as the Secretary of State is concerned. The only respect in which the Bill proposes to join the roads with the rails is by asking the Office of Rail Regulation to monitor the highways company and by giving the oversight of road users’ interests to the Passengers’ Council, which is ostensibly a body that was intended to serve the interests of rail passengers.
Lord Judd (Lab)
My Lords, frankly, I am not very optimistic about the messages that are being put forward from this side of the Committee being taken very seriously by the Minister because she seems to be completely preoccupied with drivers and passengers as the paramount interests at which we should be looking.
If one were looking at the United Kingdom from another galaxy, the first thing that would be said is, “My God, look at the size of the population of that country. Look at the different, complex dimensions to that society. Look at all the issues that arise, the different groups of real communities and real industry and commerce. How can all that be reconciled?”. From that standpoint, where is the evidence of a strategic approach? This talk about being in silos is exactly what frightens me. It is a mad way to look to our interests as an integrated, complex, interdependent nation; it is crazy. We should be looking at what strategies are required, what the interests of the community are as a whole and how to bring them together to maximum effect. That must mean a closely integrated approach towards our railway and road development—but we just do not have that. Successive generations at the Ministry of Transport and the Department for Transport have completely failed to grasp that it is just not in the interests of the British people to go on operating in this way; we have to bring it all more closely and constructively together. From that standpoint, I applaud the amendment.