Higher Education and Research Bill

Baroness Deech Excerpts

Committee: 5th sitting (Hansard): House of Lords
Monday 23rd January 2017 Lords Chamber

[Lord Judd (Lab)]

My Lords, I am very interested to find my amendment surrounded by government amendments, and I am not quite sure whether to interpret that as good will from the Government towards my amendment or what. Due process sounds an awfully boring phrase, but it is often terribly important. My amendment is very brief and to the point and is about due process. I should remind the Committee that I am involved in the governance of three universities—the LSE, the University of Newcastle and the University of Lancaster. The rights to appeal in the Bill are somewhat patchy. In particular, there is no right to appeal against a decision not to register an academic provider or to challenge the suspension of registration. Decisions over the registration, suspension or deregistration of academic institutions represent significant examples of the exercise of discretionary power by the Office for Students. It seems only right that in the exercise of these powers the Office for Students is properly accountable, and my amendment seeks to ensure that. It is not right that it should be accountable to an appeals process for decisions about removal from the register and yet will not have the same accountability for decisions to suspend or not to register. This conforms to the norms of public law that bodies should be properly accountable.

[Baroness Deech (CB)]

My Lords, I support the noble Lord, Lord Judd, and ask the Government whether they have fully considered the appeal and legal implications of this new structure. There is already quite a body of education lawyers. I have no doubt, subject to correction by noble and learned Lords, that every single significant decision in the Bill will be appealed when it comes into force. The awards of gold, silver and bronze will immediately spark judicial review, as will the metrics used for the teaching excellence framework. Grant and non-grant of title are mentioned in the Bill. Registration, validation, numbers of students, access—every single vital decision is unprotected, quite rightly, from appeals and, in particular, judicial review, which could bring a whole system to a halt.

There is already a student complaints system which will, I am sure, expand, given the promises that will have to be made under the new structure being brought into effect by the Bill. Have the Government thoroughly considered all the areas in the Bill that will be open to judicial review and how institutions and the OfS will cope with it?

[Lord Watson of Invergowrie]

My Lords, it seems to me that my noble friend Lord Judd’s suggestion would be a very useful addition. The comments of the noble Baroness, Lady Deech, just now support that.

In response to the previous group of amendments, the Minister stated that under Clause 2(1)(f) the OfS must give due consideration to “best regulatory practice”. Surely, offering somebody the opportunity to appeal a decision, which could have pretty far-reaching consequences, cannot be described as anything other than best regulatory practice. On that basis, I hope the Minister will accept the amendment in the name of my noble friend Lord Judd, along with the Government’s amendments, because it is undoubtedly a question of best regulatory practice.

--- Later in debate ---

[Baroness Lister of Burtersett (Lab)]

My Lords, I have a few questions stemming from annexe B, which the Minister circulated last week but which unfortunately I did not see until after our debate. I apologise that I was not able to attend the briefings that officials provided; I might have got the answers then. My first question relates to the point made by my noble friend Lord Lipsey. The note that was circulated said that the assessment framework stresses to assessors that they should not overweight the NSS, but of course the only metrics on actual teaching quality—this follows on from the points just made—relate to the National Student Survey. My noble friend suggested looking, therefore, at individual submissions from providers for that evidence of teaching quality, but those submissions are going to be up to only 15 pages for a whole institution. I would be grateful if the Minister would give us some indication of what kind of evidence it is anticipated that providers will present in those submissions that will focus precisely on the quality of teaching.

My second question relates to the statement immediately following—that the assessment framework mitigates the risk that courses could be dumbed down to encourage providers trying to gain the NSS. The document says that, to ensure that does not happen, the Government have included rigour and stretch as one of the criteria for the TEF and explicitly warned assessors that this may be inversely correlated with the providers’ NSS scores. I am delighted: I think it is absolutely right that rigour and stretch should be included. I remember teaching a course on theory and concepts in social policy and I think the students felt they were being stretched like elastic bands and did not always appreciate it. I think it is really important that we stretch students to think critically and assess what they are being taught, but how is this going to be assessed? It is not clear to me. It is very important but how is it going to be assessed?

My final question is: how frequently will this assessment process be carried out? We heard last week about the gold, silver and bronze system and many of us had problems with it. The Minister was not really able to satisfy our concerns. Although the Minister presented bronze as if it was the equivalent of a bronze medal in the Olympics, noble Lords here saw it as the equivalent of failure, because there is nothing underneath it—no kind of “tin” assessment or anything. If someone is classified as bronze, they may well want to try to climb out of bronze into silver as soon as they can. How quickly will it be open to them to have another go and be able to show that they have improved the quality of teaching and can then be reassessed as silver or gold? Has the Minister had the chance to reflect on what was said about the gold, silver and bronze categorisation last week? All we got was the answer that the Government think this is right. That smacked to me a bit of “I told you so” and there was no real explanation as to why, if bronze is the lowest, it will not be seen—to the outside world at least, and to potential students, here and overseas—as something to be avoided.

[Baroness Deech]

I am glad to support the noble Lord, Lord Lipsey. I have the National Student Survey in front of me. It raises profound questions about what higher education is and how it has become perverted, in that we see the student now as a consumer, because the student is paying at least £9,000.

I draw attention to some statements in the survey. One says that the workload on the student’s course is manageable. We ought to think about what that means: manageable for whom, whether you are a lazy student or an avid one? Another says that the course does not apply unnecessary pressure on the student. I am not sure about that either. There is another that says that all the compulsory modules are relevant to the student’s course. Even now, 50 years after completing a law degree, I am still pondering whether Roman law was really relevant to my course, but I yield to those who thought it was. That was long before we joined the European Union, which in a way made Roman law and the continental system more relevant. These questions would be better addressed to someone going on a package holiday. I am not sure that as it stands this student survey should play a part in the most profound questions that we face—about what a university is, what sort of young people we wish to turn out and by what process. So I hope that the survey will not be included, or that if it is it is thoroughly revised, bearing in mind the outcomes for which we are looking.

[Baroness Wolf of Dulwich]

My Lords, I support the comments of the noble Lord, Lord Lipsey, on the National Student Survey, and will speak to Amendments 194 and 201 standing in my name. Before doing so I would like to underline that we are talking about the use of measures to give ratings. With respect to the comments made by the noble Baroness, Lady Blackstone, I think that there is a huge difference between what is useful internally and what is suitable for a high-profile, high-stakes national rating system. In my first amendment I have suggested, or requested, that any measures used should be criteria-referenced, and therefore provide a substantive rating and indication of attainment or degree of attainment. I am slightly alarmed that this is even at issue, and take issue with the noble Lord, Lord Willetts, when he suggests that benchmarking is the way forward.

I have an example from the rail regulator. We can be told what proportion of trains are late, which is a substantive measure: we can have a target—which in fact it has—which says that it is reasonable that there should be X per cent, and then you fall this far short. We can be told whether a given rail company is doing better or worse than the others. This year it is really pretty easy for everybody to do better than Southern, but does that mean that they are all doing well? I do not think that you can conclude that.

If you have benchmarked or relative measures, the problem is that all that you are being told is how people stand relative to each other. We might have a system in which the quality of teaching was excellent across the board, yet in which half the institutions would by definition be below average; or we could have a system in which all the institutions were doing rather poor-quality teaching, yet in which half of them would be above average. That is not the sort of system that we wish to use. We would not wish to imply to students that that gave them helpful information. A measure that is bad does not become good by being made relative; and a measure that is good is good in its own right, not simply by being turned into something in which you rank people on the curve. That is an important aspect of how the Office for Students approaches the sorts of ratings that it gives and the way in which it conceives of them.