Higher Education: EUC Report

Baroness Blackstone Excerpts

Thursday 11th October 2012 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Blackstone]

My Lords, I very much welcome the report by the EU Committee on The Modernisation of Higher Education in Europe. In particular, I should like to draw the House’s attention to the last paragraph in the summary of the report, which sums up what this debate should be about. It states:

“The EU can continue to make a positive contribution to the modernisation of European higher education but it must be pragmatic and concentrate on areas where it can truly add value”,

a point which I underline. It continues:

“For its part, the Government should place higher education at the centre of its growth agenda, domestically and across Europe, by drawing on the potential of both the EU and the Bologna Process”.

Again, I very much agree with that point.

It is important to acknowledge that although education, including higher education, is primarily a member state responsibility, under the treaty the EU and, in particular, the Commission can encourage the,

“development of quality education by encouraging cooperation between Member States”.

That is set out in paragraph 1 of the committee’s report. It lists a variety of ways, which I will not go through, in which this can happen, and all of them seem pertinent to this debate. Other Members of your Lordships’ House may want to take them up. In my view it would not be acceptable for Commission directives on all or any of these matters to be issued. In this area, its role should be as a facilitator and not as a purveyor of pan-European higher education policies. It needs to interact with the Bologna process, neither determining it nor duplicating it.

In 1999, as the noble Baroness, Lady Young, has just mentioned, I signed the Bologna declaration on behalf of the UK, following the Sorbonne declaration the year before. At that time I strongly argued that the EU should not do a takeover job in relation to what was being proposed for Bologna and I was not terribly popular with some of my ministerial colleagues, some of whom, although not all, saw this as a matter for the Commission. I am glad to say that in the end my intransigence won the argument. I felt very strongly that the Bologna process should be much wider than the EU countries—which now number 27. I cannot remember the precise number at that time except that it was quite a few less. I wanted to see the whole of Europe brought into the Bologna process, from Iceland in the west to Turkey in the east. I thought that it was really important that we should reach out to this wider range of countries, particularly some of those countries in central and eastern Europe and the Balkans which were not yet part of the EU.

I felt very strongly that the whole Bologna process should not be a top-down one from Brussels but very much a bottom-up one, with the kind of voluntary and consensual approach that the committee identifies and which has indeed been adopted. At the time I was not quite sure whether this would lead anywhere after all the work that had been done, and whether it would work. I think that I should have been a bit more confident. Some of the things that I did as a Minister have been wiped off the sheet altogether, but they are mainly domestic decisions that have been overturned by this Government, such as EMAs—to my great regret. But at least this international one is rather more difficult for the coalition Government to overturn, and it is to the credit of all those people who have been involved in the Bologna process since then that there are now 47 countries that participate in it and it is a vibrant process where genuine debate is taking place.

It was difficult for some of the countries that signed up for this to engage in the common framework proposed, with the three-stage structure—higher education, bachelor’s degrees, master’s degrees and PhDs—whereas it was very easy for us. It was described by my French colleague, Claude Allègre, as the Anglo-Saxon approach to higher education. That is one way of putting it. But we did not have to make the enormous changes that some of the other participants did. The noble Baroness, Lady Young, has questioned whether the UK Government or universities have really embraced it. I do not know what the current Government’s position is, but certainly I believed that the then Labour Government did engage with it and did encourage the higher education sector to do so. I cannot really speak for universities, either, but my recent experience tells me that most universities entirely accept the value of Bologna, although they may sometimes be a little bit passive about it when perhaps they should be a bit more active.

The other concern that I had at the time was that the UK would be pushed into longer master’s degrees. After all, the other bit of the Anglo-Saxon approach in the United States involves two-year master’s degrees, and many European Union countries thought that that was probably right. However, I was absolutely determined that the integrity of our intensive one-year master’s degrees should be maintained, and I thought that that had been accepted. But clearly from reading the committee’s report, some universities are still finding that in practice there are issues about this in some of the countries that are signed up to Bologna, so that when graduates from the UK go back to their own countries they are questioned about the validity of their one-year master’s degree qualification. That is wholly unacceptable, and I ask the UK Government to take this up at the meeting in Bucharest, if they are able to do so.

There are some other more detailed areas where the recognition of our qualifications has to be fought for. I give you one example, which I feel quite strongly about. Those who decide to enter the medical profession, after graduating in another subject, particularly if they have graduated in science degrees, should not be forced to start all over again with a five-year medical programme. There is a four-year scheme, but I gather that there have been some issues about that in the EU. I believe that there should be a three and a half year scheme for people with a master’s degree and an undergraduate degree in biological sciences, for example. It is an absurd waste of British taxpayers’ money to make these young people who enter medicine a little later go right back to the very beginning. I hope that the Minister will look into this with her colleagues at the Department of Health to see whether we can get rid of these absurdities and have larger numbers coming into shortened courses. This is also a matter for the professional qualifications directorate in Brussels, which is supposed to be engaged in a pragmatic modernisation of some of these issues. Again, the committee refers to them.

I wish to say something about student mobility in general and Erasmus in particular. I think it is common sense that geographical mobility among able young people has a positive effect. I very much agree with what the noble Viscount, Lord Bridgeman, has just said about the widening of understanding of other cultures being important, as is the challenge of living abroad and the greater independence and maturity which can derive from that. However, if I read the committee’s remarks correctly, it was right to be a little sceptical about whether student mobility in Europe conveyed direct benefits with regard to employment. I do not know that employers take an awful lot of notice of such mobility although perhaps they should. We should also remember that most mobility arises through students taking individual decisions to study elsewhere than in their home country and not through Erasmus programmes. Far more students come to the UK on this basis than UK students go to Europe although this could change if English becomes the main language for the delivery of teaching in many more European universities.

I draw the Minister’s attention to a related matter although it is not something on which the committee commented. We are sitting on a time bomb in relation to the repayment of fees by European Union students. The Government have simply no idea how they will recover the fees that are given to European Union students as a loan. Graduates in the UK have to pay back fees through the Inland Revenue but that is not the case for European Union students. I would like the Minister to say how this will be done and what the Government will do if there is a huge default given that they have no mechanism with which to tackle this issue.

The take-up of Erasmus schemes by UK students is relatively low, as has been reported, which is regrettable. The committee offers as an explanation the monolingual nature of our society. I am sure that that has something to do with it, along with perhaps a rather regrettable lack of interest in European Union countries on the part of many of our young people. Some of the low take-up may be due to a justified scepticism about the quality of what some European universities are able to offer, and that is not as good as it should be. However, some speakers in the debate will not be surprised to hear me say that I believe that the solution the committee offers is much too simplistic. I do not believe that compelling the teaching of foreign languages in primary and secondary schools will make a great difference. It simply will not work. It is not realistic. We do not have enough foreign language teachers to teach foreign languages in secondary schools, let alone to introduce it in primary schools. I believe that foreign language learning will again be compulsory at stage 4, as it has been in the past. However, when it was compulsory, how many young people with a GCSE in French, Spanish or any other modern language could actually speak the language afterwards? Very few could do so and they soon forgot what they had learnt. Therefore, we need to think rather more laterally about how to deal with this issue. I would like to see some pilots undertaken of gap-year programmes, particularly where the students undertaking them are going to study the social sciences at university and have an interest in economic, political or social issues in Europe. Such programmes should comprise a really intensive three or four months of learning a foreign language in Europe. They will be much more proficient than they would be if they had been made to do it at GCSE and then no more after that. We have seen the decline in the numbers taking a foreign language at A-level—a process that I fear is irreversible, given that English is now our global language. I was pleased when I discovered that my four year-old grandson was learning Spanish in his nursery class. However, I am afraid to say that he has now moved to another primary school’s reception class where Spanish is not taught. His one word in Spanish, “hola”, is likely to vanish fairly soon. I am a bit sceptical about this issue. People have been saying for years that we need more foreign language study but it does not happen, and it will not. We have to think a bit harder about it.

I also thought that there was a slight contradiction in what the committee wanted to do in this area. It admitted that there is a huge growth in the teaching of English in many European universities. I believe that that will continue. It makes it less necessary for our students to learn a foreign language, even if it may be desirable for more of them to be multilingual. I am a little sceptical about the claims made in paragraph 84 of the report, but endorse the committee’s recommendation on looking at shorter and more flexible ways of delivering Erasmus.

I want to say a couple more things, although I am running out of time. First, I hope that the Government will look seriously at the master’s-level student loan guarantee. The soaring costs of undergraduate education to our graduates is bound to lead to a dampening of demand for postgraduate higher education. We will have to provide more incentives. Therefore, the proposal from the Commission deserves to be taken seriously. I ask the Minister whether or not the UK Government support it. I have heard on the grapevine that their response so far has been indifferent.

I want to end by briefly referring to a project, Empower European Universities, led by Jo Ritzen, the ex-Education Minister of the Netherlands, with two other former Education Ministers. I am also involved. The project is not referred to in the committee report, but it is an important study. Its starting point is that university autonomy leads to greater flexibility, innovation, creative uses of scarce resources and better outcomes in the long term. The study focuses on HE systems, not individual universities, and looks at the extent to which university systems allow a degree of autonomy without intrusive and undesirable interference to make those outcomes happen. The UK scores well in this respect but the study points to the fact that it could be in the “on the way down” category. I hope the Minister will look at the report.

To conclude, the role of HE in economic growth is paramount. I hope that the Government will give the reassurance we all want—that this will be an area where public expenditure priority is attached. We cannot just rely on the European Union to make up for any failings on the part of nation states.