Higher Education and Research Bill

Baroness Bakewell Excerpts

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

[Baroness Bakewell (Lab)]

I support my noble friend Lord Lipsey in deploring this title. Words are significant. My noble friend mentioned George Orwell. He knew how slippery language can be. In the fake news and post-truth era, getting words exact matters more than ever. We know that in the light of the Bill students could be called consumers and providers could be entrepreneurs—business men or women. We know that language is loose and being used loosely in politics generally. Hard, soft—when have these words ever been as powerful as they are today? We have to be very thoughtful about this title.

We have spent the day discussing a whole range of activities—knowledge, research, wisdom, range of scholarship, academic life, the global achievements of our universities—and the best we can come up with is the Office for Students. What about the rest of us? What about all the universities and their authority? What about the range of scholarship and achievement of which we are so proud? Finally, on a rather silly note, are the Government really pleased that this will become known as “Ofstud”?

[Baroness Garden of Frognal (LD)]

I, too, support the noble Lord, Lord Lipsey. The Office for Students was always a rather strange title for this all-encompassing and all-powerful body. It was particularly ironic because it took quite some effort to get students in any way involved with it or represented on it. The Office for Higher Education seems an eminently sensible title for it. As the noble Baroness, Lady Bakewell, said, that covers all the aspects that this strange body is going to be responsible for. The Minister should think very seriously about changing the title.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Lucas]

My Lords, I shall speak to Amendments 11 and 13. I am mostly interested in hearing the Minister’s views on these matters. It seems to me that it is important for a board such as that of the OfS to have experience of the main sets of people and tasks that it is going to be faced with regulating. Amendment 11 would ensure that its members had an understanding of what happens in vocational or professional education. That would be very important because some of its charges will be very much in that part of the world.

Most of all, the amendment would ensure that the OfS has representative people who understand how people end up at university. The business of advising school pupils, looking after pupils who are looking for careers, the limitations of that, the sort of information you need on how 16 and 17 year-olds are, which is very different from 19 and 20 year-old students at university—that is vital experience for a board to have. A great deal of what the OfS is doing is concerned with giving information to people who might come to university and providing structures in order that they should be well looked-after when they get there, so it needs an understanding of what pupils are like.

[Baroness Bakewell]

My Lords, I speak from my background at Birkbeck University on behalf of a sector that has not had much of a hearing today—I hope it will have a hearing throughout further debate on the Bill—which is that of part-time university study and of lifelong learning. It is my conviction that this is the shape of the future and will bulk far larger than is acknowledged in the future lives of people struggling to qualify and retrain in a population who will need retraining in new skills throughout their lives. Part-time education to university level, which is carried out at Birkbeck, is enormously popular with those who do it but, as the Minister will know, has recently suffered an enormous fall in recruitment. This followed the introduction of student fees, and we are examining reasons why that should be so and seeking to remedy them. We need to include in the essence of the Bill the fact that part-time university study is a valid, important and growing sector.

It is for that reason that I have tabled Amendment 5A, which adds emphasis to Amendment 5 by stating that one of the members of the board should be dedicated to the interests of part-time further education. This is very important because we find that a much higher proportion of the students who graduate from Birkbeck are from disadvantaged backgrounds than from any other university. This plays absolutely into the Government’s intention of increasing access, so they have a very strong motive to facilitate this kind of education, which has not figured very much in all of today’s extensive debate. It deserves a much higher profile and it will reap rewards. It will benefit not simply 18 to 24 year-old students; people are graduating from Birkbeck in their 50s, 60s and 70s with full-scale degrees. They are retraining, they come from every kind of background and they really appreciate the training they get. A dedicated member of the board for further education among part-time students is very much to be desired.

[Lord Liddle (Lab)]

My Lords, I refer to my interest as pro-chancellor of Lancaster University. I very much regret that I was not here for the earlier debates. The reason was that I was present at the funeral of Lord Taylor of Blackburn, who was for many years deputy pro-chancellor of the university I presently chair and, more significantly, played a very important role in the foundation of the University of Lancaster, one of the Robbins universities. He saw that the creation of these universities enabled the extension of opportunity. We at Lancaster certainly think that that is the job we are doing, because of the high proportion of pupils from state schools we have, at the same time achieving high standards of academic excellence. I put that on record and apologise that I was not here earlier.

I very much support the thrust of what my noble friend Lord Stevenson is driving at in his amendments. If the Office for Students is to exist, it must be composed of people of the highest calibre. It must reflect the full range of concerns in higher education—and I very much agree with the speech that the noble Baroness, Lady Bakewell, has just made about the importance of part-time education. That has been reflected, and it is one of the things that I would like us to do far more of in my own institution.