Higher Education and Research Bill

Baroness Cohen of Pimlico Excerpts

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

[Baroness Cohen of Pimlico (Lab)]

My Lords, I should remind the House that I am chancellor of and senior adviser to BPP University and was an honorary fellow of two Cambridge colleges for mature students—St Edmund’s and the Lucy Cavendish.

I intend to speak exclusively about the provisions of the Bill that seek to extend degree-awarding powers more widely and to regulate institutions of higher education differently. I think I am the first—and I may be the only—speaker in this debate with experience of what it is like to be in one of the institutions authorised under the last Higher Education Act. I should perhaps remind the House, in view of the comments from my own side, that that was introduced and passed by a Labour Government.

The BPP group goes back a long way. It was created in 1976 by three accountants and specialised in the teaching of accountancy for the professional examinations. We added the teaching of law in the late 1990s and secured degree-awarding powers in 2007. We are widely recognised in the professions and the City. Some 40% of all new entrants into the English legal profession are educated by BPP, more than 120,000 students study with the university and the wider group every year, and two-thirds of all accountants qualifying today either study with us or use our study materials. There are many BPP alumni in both Houses of Parliament, including the noble Lord, Lord Holmes of Richmond. Our management goes back a long way, too. Today is, by chance, the 20th anniversary of our vice-chancellor, Professor Carl Lygo, joining the group and making our law school so successful. I have been a peripheral part of the group for 23 years, since I joined as a non-executive director.

The university offers, in our law school, graduate and undergraduate degrees on a full or part-time basis in all aspects of business law. On the same basis, including on a part-time basis, our business school offers degrees in accountancy, finance and marketing. We have seven centres, five of them outside London. We continue to expand and now offer degrees in nursing, working with two NHS trusts. In what we regard as a very important development, we have 2,000 degree-level apprentices studying with BPP at the moment, known to us as the “zero-debt” degree option. We expect to teach many more as the projected apprenticeship levy comes into force.

We charge lower fees than most: £5,000 annually for our three-year undergraduate degrees and £6,000 a year for the intensive two-year undergraduate degrees. We have very high retention and progression rates, and our graduates get good jobs. Our staff are employed on proper terms and proper contracts, and are well paid. Most are very long-serving. I cannot begin to imagine what any of them would say to a zero-hours contract were we idiotic enough to offer it.

It took us four long and expensive years, from 2003 to 2007, to get degree-awarding powers. We were an early applicant and the only for-profit private sector group seeking those powers, so the QAA approached us with great caution. However, I welcome—with only slightly gritted teeth—the Bill’s provisions to streamline regulatory requirements for getting degree-awarding powers and to award these powers to institutions that wish to offer degrees in a limited range of subjects. With what relief we would have accepted either of those as a method of shortening the long process of getting degree-awarding powers. We never intended to teach outside our core subjects of law and business. I can see no reason why other institutions which intend an equally limited offering should not have an easier run to degree-awarding powers for subjects in which they have real expertise and teaching experience.

I also welcome the Bill’s proposals to subject all higher education institutions with degree-awarding powers to the same regulatory regime, ending the anomalous position whereby new but highly successful institutions such as BPP University are rigorously regulated and inspected and older universities with terrible retention rates, which turn out graduates who have difficulty getting into the workforce at a level that rewards their investment, are not so inspected.

The proposals for more targeted regulation are also welcome. They may be formulaic but the limited number of key performance indicators will tell a regulator very quickly if things are not going right. These include: a falling off in the retention rate, progression rate or employability numbers; a sharp fall in staff numbers and their qualifications; or a fall in student numbers. These are straightforward statistics that can be looked at off-site and should obviate the need for routine visits and enable regulatory attention to be concentrated on the trouble spots shown up. So I support these provisions and think they are completely unexceptionable.

Students are at the heart of the Bill and as both chancellor of BPP and a Member of your Lordships’ House concerned with public policy, I welcome the renewed emphasis on the needs of students, as evidenced by the setting up of the Office for Students and the new clause added in Committee in the other place which provides for student representation in the Office for Students. The present system depends heavily on students behaving like well-informed customers able to decide for themselves what they want. Like the noble Baroness, Lady Eccles, I do not believe in calling students “customers”. They really are not: they are students. Too often they have had to choose an institution on the basis of the social life, the accommodation or where their friends are going. All these are important but surely not on a par with the basic information of whether or not they are likely to emerge with a degree, let alone a job.

So far, so good for the proposals in the Bill. My experience, however, makes me very uncomfortable with the idea of granting degree-awarding powers to institutions with no track record in the field for which they seek these powers and which are essentially start-ups. I took a little time to outline BPP’s history because our years of experience and the quality of our staff are what have led to our success, not just sensible regulation. The technical notes to the Bill make it clear that the staff proposed and the financial stability of the new entity will be very carefully scrutinised, and I welcome the thought. But the Department for Education has less than happy experience of bringing in a star head teacher to turn round a failing school only to find that after an initial improvement the school has been left in no better state. The most successful institutions in education or commerce have well-defined cultures with clear agreed values, which have taken time to develop and are not easily achieved with brand new teams that have not worked together before.

I will stop after saying that there are even greater problems with granting degree-awarding powers or provisional degree-awarding powers to institutions or teams with no experience in the UK, and this provision should be treated with great caution. It seems likely that it will be foreign-based institutions with low retention rates, often dependent on online teaching, rather than Harvard or the École des Mines, which will be applying under this provision. There are huge real difficulties with judging the quality of online-based institutions, whether based in the UK or elsewhere. Great caution must be exercised.

This is my last page. In conclusion, as a lawyer and given the huge new responsibilities being devolved to the Office for Students, I would like to see more of its duties and responsibilities appear in the Bill. We are all familiar with the wish of government to future-proof legislation by providing codes of practice that can be changed, but this argument should not be applied to the targeted regulation of higher education. The key educational indicators are universal and unchanging and I wish to see more of these specified so that we can all be clear from the Bill itself what is expected of higher education institutions and their regulation.