Higher Education Sector
Baroness Fox of Buckley Excerpts(2 weeks, 6 days ago)
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Baroness Smith of Malvern (Lab)
Well, I simply reiterate the point that it is important that this Government have gripped the issue of financial sustainability and have asked the OfS to focus on it. The OfS has made its decisions about where to focus its capacity to enable it to do that. I take seriously the point that the noble Lord made, but it is the role of the OfS as the regulator of the sector to regulate, to ensure that we have the sort of quality that—I disagree with the noble Lord—will continue to attract students, researchers and others into the UK.
Baroness Fox of Buckley (Non-Afl)
My Lords, over the years, many international students, especially from less democratic countries, were attracted to UK universities because of their reputation as beacons of free speech. Tragically, more recently such students have complained that they find British campuses as censorious as at home. In this context, will the Government reinstate the shelved Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) Act? On a related point, will the Minister reassure us that this legislation was not withdrawn to appease repressive regimes that like the UK university brands but dislike legal commitment to academic freedom?
Baroness Smith of Malvern (Lab)
I can absolutely assure the noble Baroness that that was not the case, as I have said repeatedly in this House. But it is the case that the last Government’s freedom of speech legislation would have been overly burdensome on universities and would potentially have had unintended consequences. As I have also said, we will come back soon, following our pause of the legislation and our wide engagement with stakeholders, to spell out the next steps for this Government in protecting academic freedom and freedom of speech in our universities.
Sex and Gender: Official Data
Baroness Fox of Buckley Excerpts(1 month, 2 weeks ago)
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Baroness Fox of Buckley
To ask His Majesty’s Government, following the downgrading of data gathered from the 2021 Census question on gender identity, what steps they are taking to ensure accurate and consistent data on sex and gender are collected to ensure robust official data.
The Minister of State, Department for Education (Baroness Smith of Malvern) (Lab)
My Lords, the Government value the collection of high quality and robust data on this topic. The Government Statistical Service will publish a work plan for updated, harmonised standards and guidance on sex and gender in December this year. This will align with the Office for National Statistics regulation guidance on collecting and reporting data about sex and gender identity, which was published in February.
Baroness Fox of Buckley (Non-Afl)
I thank the Minister for that reply. In the meantime, can she look closely at one worrying consequence? NHS data standards were updated to reflect those very same compromised gender identity questions used in the census. Genspect UK research shows that a significant number of GPs also use them, which in theory means that every time someone registers with a new doctor, patients could informally change the sex registered on their health records. Does the Minister agree that this is concerning because biological sex influences everything from diagnosis to treatment? Therefore, the recording of accurate sex data in NHS records is essential for safe and appropriate healthcare.
Baroness Smith of Malvern (Lab)
The reason why it is so important that we allow the independent statistical services to develop the question appropriately is precisely that it will be used more widely in other public services. Of course it is important that that has the confidence of those responding to the question and of the services being provided. To that extent, therefore, I share the noble Baroness’s concern to ensure that that statistical collection is robust and appropriate and is informing services, including the NHS, in a way that users need it to.
Higher Education Funding
Baroness Fox of Buckley Excerpts(3 months, 1 week ago)
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Baroness Fox of Buckley (Non-Afl)
My Lords, I welcome this debate, but will perhaps challenge its focus. When the Education Secretary Bridget Phillipson halted the Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) Act only a week before its commencement, she insisted that the Office for Students should instead “be more sharply focused” on the financial stability of universities. To me, this rather implies knowing the price of everything and the value of nothing. When we discuss the challenges of a sector struggling financially, it worries me if government or university senior management think that academic freedom is a dispensable lower priority and is valued less than propping up higher education institutions as businesses.
I rather regret the marketisation of education that we have seen over recent decades. It has long since caused problems, undermining the core role of universities in intellectual freedom, and academics are told to treat students as customers who need to be kept satisfied, rather than offended or challenged. Students are educated to see degrees as commodities that can be bought and assessed via value-for-money metrics. I regret such philistinism and its consequences.
I am heartbroken, for example, to see the closure of many arts and humanities courses and to see wonderful academics lose their jobs. They are often told that, because they do not tick the production of job-ready graduates box, they are not relevant for 2024. What is the good of all that useless knowledge associated with philosophy, classical music, medieval history and so on?
Realistically, I think that we need to ask whether we should keep universities, departments and courses open at any cost and have that conversation. The question has to be asked: what price academic freedom in that context? When vice-chancellors and higher education NGOs, which lobbied the Government to smother the free speech Act, said they were worried that the legislation could lead to universities being sued at a time when they were facing crippling costs, surely the Government’s reply should have been, “Well, you won’t get sued if you promote and protect free speech on campus stridently”. The Government should also say, “You aren’t a university worth its name if you don’t understand that free speech is a core value, more valuable than anything else, and totally valuable to your existence”.
When the Free Speech Union sent a pre-action protocol letter to Ms Phillipson threatening a judicial review for the failure to commence a free speech Act, it was shocking when we found out that government lawyers noted that concerns had been raised by university managers and senior managers about the consequences of the law on doing business with authoritarian countries that have restrictions on free speech. How grubby that, because some British universities operate overseas students and do not want to lose out on the money, they are prepared to compromise on free speech. The fact that English universities want to boost opportunities for lucrative research partnerships means that they do not want a piece of free speech legislation that might upset China, Dubai or Singapore.
As for attracting more international students, I do not, in any way, do anything other than endorse that. But the self-congratulatory tone that we have heard worries me, because, too often, international students are cynically treated as cash cows rather than welcomed here as some act of philanthropic generosity. Many of the overseas students I have worked with over recent years have noted that they came here imagining that they would find free speech on campus as a value, but actually, having left China, they found it even more restrictive to face some of the cancel culture on campus. I ask for a different set of priorities here.