Higher Education and Research Bill

Debate between Baroness Garden of Frognal and Lord Lipsey

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

[Baroness Garden of Frognal (LD)]

My Lords, I support the amendments proposed by the noble Duke, the Duke of Wellington. I have added my name to Amendment 72 in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Blunkett, and I entirely endorse all that he has said. I pay tribute to him for all that he has done for education in this country. His amendment is supported by the noble Baroness, Lady Wolf, and myself, and I shall speak briefly to Amendment 73, which stands in my name and that of my noble friend Lord Storey.

Amendment 72 sets out a scheme to evaluate teaching and encourage best practice based on systems already in place in universities. In Committee, my noble friend Lord Storey said:

“Teaching is not just about knowledge but also about how you relate to young people. The most knowledgeable and gifted professor may be unable to relate to a young person, and therefore cannot teach the subject”.—[Official Report, 18/1/17; col. 272.]


That is why I come back to my call for all those required to teach in universities to be offered training in the skill of teaching. Having a higher education teaching qualification would be ideal, but it is very unlikely to meet the favour of the Government or, indeed, of universities. It is important that training in how to teach should be available to all those who are expected to teach in universities. That would do more to raise standards than the threats of the TEF metrics. I repeat the call to end zero-hours contracts for academic staff, to which we will refer later today. Constant employment insecurity is not conducive to commitment to high standards of teaching.

The amendment in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Blunkett, offers a productive way forward. It calls for assessment of meeting or not meeting expectations and would certainly minimise the damaging league tables or single composite rankings, which do much more to disincentivise those working hard in challenging situations than they do to encourage those who regularly feature at the top of such rankings.

I also pick up the noble Duke’s point. It may be that universities that support the TEF do so not just to raise teaching standards but because the Government are coercing them with fee rises. It would be interesting to see, if fee rises were uncoupled, how many would be so wholehearted in this untried and untested set of metrics.

Our Amendment 73 has already been addressed in earlier debates. It would prevent the TEF being used to determine eligibility for a visa for students to attend universities. I shall not speak more on that because we covered this issue pretty comprehensively. I certainly support all the amendments in this group.

[Lord Lipsey (Lab)]

My Lords, I shall speak to Amendment 69 on the National Student Survey and Amendment 67 on postponing by a year the ability of TEF rankings to affect the fees universities can charge. Noble Lords will be relieved to hear that I will not repeat the longish and geekish speech I made in Committee on the National Student Survey. I look forward to hearing from the noble Lord, Lord Bew—a man whose expertise in this field no one in the House will doubt—putting the main arguments forward. However, the House ought to be updated on two recent developments that bear on the validity of the NSS.

First, there is the letter of 23 February from Ed Humpherson, the director-general for regulation at the UK Statistics Authority, to the DfE, responding to concerns raised with that authority on the NSS. It is a letter that needs a little reading between the lines, but in summary it refers approvingly to what Ministers have done to downgrade the NSS in the TEF. I will come back to that in a minute. It tells the department it must address the recommendations in the ONS report of June 2016 on the NSS and of the Royal Statistical Society in July 2016. Why do I draw attention to those two documents? They are the fundamental and official documents on which the critics of the NSS rest their case. They also take reading between the lines, but when this is done they are excoriating critiques.

Secondly, there is the question of benchmarking. Those reports and everyone who has addressed this subject agree that you cannot use the TEF for direct comparison between institutions. You simply cannot use it to compare the Royal College of Music and Trinity Laban—the two conservatoires that my noble friend Lord Winston and I have the honour of chairing—with Kingston University or any other I could mention. Instead, we are supposed to use benchmarking, which means comparing similar institutions.

Benchmarking raises its own set of statistical questions, which I will spare the House, so the Government decided that they needed an independent report on benchmarking and its statistical difficulties. What does that report say? It says nothing. Why does it say nothing? It is because it does not exist. Why does it not exist? It is because the Higher Education Statistics Agency, which admits this perfectly freely, has failed to commission it. It has been very difficult to get anyone to take it on. The pillar that bears the NSS in the TEF may be of solid oak, or it may be completely rotten. Without that study we have no idea.

The amendment I am speaking to calls for an inquiry into the NSS. I am delighted by all the concessions that the Government have made on the NSS in the TEF—although I should not call them “concessions”; they have given way to reason on these subjects—including its official downgrading to the least important metric, the admission of its shortcomings for small institutions, the one-year postponement of the subject TEF and the lessons-learned exercise. All those are sensible and welcome concessions from the Government. However, they mandate one further concession. It would be a self-inflicted blunder by the Government now to go ahead and let the TEF stop some universities’ raising fees on the original timetable until and unless that lessons-learned exercise has been completed and, indeed, the study that was supposed to have been commissioned by the Higher Education Statistics Agency has been commissioned.

We have been jumping in the dark into a pit whose depth we do not know. I want, and most noble Lords want, the TEF to work, but a rushed TEF, littered with statistical errors, will not work. If Ministers want the TEF to last—they do, and I do—they need a measured timetable for its introduction. They need to give it time to bed down. Otherwise, the flaws that I and others have been pointing to in this debate will turn from glints in the eyes of the geeks to real-world inadequacies and perhaps in some cases will even threaten the existence of the institutions that lose out as a result of those flaws. That would undermine the legitimacy of the whole scheme.

I beg the Minister, who has made so much progress with this Bill, not to concede, at the last minute, an own goal which may mean that what could have been a reasonable victory turns into a dreadful loss.