Higher Education and Research Bill

Debate between Baroness Butler-Sloss and Lord Winston

Report: 2nd sitting (Hansard): House of Lords
Wednesday 8th March 2017 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Butler-Sloss (CB)]

My Lords, I wonder whether I could tell your Lordships’ House a story, which follows on entirely from what the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, has said. I was chancellor of the University of the West of England and took a group of professors to China. We went to prestigious universities and to some that were less so. I met the deputy Minister of Education. Everybody in China was with us; we were about to do all sorts of work. However, an assessment came out that showed that, according to the Times, we were below the 50 number. China said that it would not work with any of us and so we retreated. That is exactly what the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, has said in relation to those who might be bronze. It really will not do. We had already been working with China in the various universities, including the University of Peking and the University of Tsinghua in Beijing, but because of our rating, which came out after we left, we no longer did business with them.

[Lord Winston (Lab)]

I, too, support this group of amendments. Rather bizarrely, just as this debate started—it is not because he knew that I was sitting in the Chamber or would be talking about higher education—I had an email from Professor Colin Lawson of the Royal College of Music to tell me that the Royal College of Music has just been rated second in the world for music education. He says, “Notwithstanding my disdain for these rankings, this is something I am very pleased with”.

There is a real issue here. To follow up on what the noble Lord, Lord Lipsey, said, it is utterly ridiculous to suggest that you can assess arts teaching by this kind of approach of rankings. Music is interpreted in all sorts of ways. Just as art colleges are rather similar—I believe that drama colleges are as well—all sorts of endeavours such as this cannot be rated in the way that the Government propose. This is extremely dangerous, particularly for the conservatoire, which attracts a large proportion of its students from Asia and depends very much on them.

Perhaps I may briefly declare an interest. I am professor of science and society at Imperial College. The reason I was not involved so much in Committee is that I had been teaching in schools on behalf of the university in Lancashire, Yorkshire, Derbyshire, Lincoln and Avon in the same week as the Committee stage and trying to get back to London in time on the train service, which is rather difficult. We teach practical science in the reach-out lab and have had PhD students coming through assessing the teaching. It is very clear that it is one thing to be able to assess learning, but teaching assessment is extremely complex. None of the ways in which we are doing this at the moment is nearly adequate. It is a major problem, because if we get it wrong the risk of damage in these cases is massive.

I shall give just one example, because I recognise that this is the Report stage. Some years ago, on two occasions, I ran a free communications course for students at Imperial College. The courses lasted for one and two days, students signed up on a first come, first served basis, and they were massively oversubscribed because undergraduates wanted to learn how they could communicate their science better. What was really interesting—I do not say this in my favour—was that the British and EU students almost universally gave us a rating of nine or 10 on the assessment of the course afterwards. The Chinese and other Asian students were not giving us anything like that rating: they gave us four, five or six, averaging about five. The reason for this, when we did a questionnaire with them, was that, unlike the British students, they said, “This is not going to get me a job anywhere; this is not going to be of any value to me commercially”. Yet, of course, in terms of the education of a student, it is vital.

I beg the Government to think about this rating system extremely carefully. If we get this wrong, we will damage not only the very top universities but other universities that are coming up at present. That would be a disaster for the United Kingdom and for our education.