Higher Education and Research Bill

Baroness Lister of Burtersett Excerpts

Committee: 4th sitting (Hansard): House of Lords
Wednesday 18th January 2017 Lords Chamber

I was an academic for 38 years. Luckily, I am not a vice-chancellor or a chancellor or anywhere, so I do not have to defend my university, but we cannot go on thinking that universities are beyond judgment and should be left alone to do whatever they do. Those days are gone.

[Baroness Lister of Burtersett (Lab)]

My Lords, I do not think anybody is suggesting that universities should just be left to get on with it. I preface my remarks by saying how important I believe teaching to be. I went into higher education halfway through my working life. I had never taught, and I was shocked to discover there was nothing to train me how to teach: it was just assumed that an academic could relay their subject and teach it. That is completely different now. All universities have very good support to ensure that their staff teach well.

That said, I accept that it is important that there is some kind of assessment of teaching to balance the research assessment—the REF, as it is now called—to which my noble friend Lord Desai referred. REF is based on a direct assessment of the quality of the research; as I understand it, TEF will not be. I will not repeat the good critique that has been made by colleagues both now and at Second Reading of the metrics currently proposed, and I am not sure what the answer is. I can remember—I cannot remember in which year it was now—something called the TQA, or teaching quality assessment. I can remember quaking in my boots as some independent assessor came in to observe my lectures and tutorials. I am not sure what happened to it. It was a huge bureaucratic burden on the universities, so I am not saying that that is necessarily the answer. I am not sure what the answer is, but it is quite clear from what is being said in the sector, by students and people around the Committee that, as proposed, those metrics are not.

In his summing up, will the Minister explain exactly how he thinks the proposed metrics will tell us anything about actual teaching quality? What will be fed back to individual lecturers about their teaching? At Second Reading he said that,

“The TEF is designed to improve teaching”.—[Official Report, 6/12/16; col. 721]


How will it improve teaching? Will he explain that to us? If I were still lecturing, how would I know how to improve my teaching on the basis of the TEF and these metrics? It is not clear to me at all how that will happen.

Given the widespread disquiet and difficulties of doing this, will the Minister reflect on the likely adverse implications of this traffic light system, which the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, on Second Reading called a “ranking system for turkeys”? Perhaps that is appropriate in the consumer culture we are talking about, but it is not appropriate for education.

[Lord Willetts (Con)]

My Lords, I shall comment briefly on some of the remarks about the NSS and perhaps try to address some of the concerns and offer noble Lords on both sides of the Committee a bit of assurance about what is happening here.

I should begin by drawing attention to the fact that I am a visiting professor at King’s College London, which sadly scores rather low on the NSS. I will not detain the Committee with a special pleading of why I think that is a completely misleading picture of the excellent work done at King’s. I also chair the advisory board of the Times Higher, which itself produces university rankings.

Surely what we are trying to do is embark on a journey towards what should be reliable metrics of teaching quality and learning gain. Of course, we do not have those yet. The question is whether we do anything now or wait until we have these superior and trusted metrics. The dilemma that one faces is that, back in 2010, there really was only the NSS, and it has been caricatured as simply a question of a student’s kind of, “What’s it like for you?”. We have already seen changes in the NSS and, if I may get into the technical language, it is becoming much more like the National Survey of Student Engagement which does try to get closer to the academic experience of the student.

The measure that will be used in formulating the TEF is not the generic question, “How was it for you?”. My understanding is that that is not what will appear in the TEF. There will be the earlier questions in the NSS. The NSS has more than 20 questions, and incidentally is completed by hundreds of thousands of students. It is the earlier questions that are closest to engagement that will be the ones used in the TEF. They are particularly questions about teaching on their course and on assessment and feedback.

The noble Lord who spoke for the Opposition when he opened said there had been no evidence that anything had been getting better. I can tell him that the fact that many universities have done disappointingly badly on assessment and feedback has led universities to change their practice and give students much more prompt reactions on their essays or other forms of work than they used to receive. I would argue that assessment and feedback are regarded as having genuine value and significance in the world of universities. Those measures are the measures extracted from the NSS which will be part of the overall metric for the TEF. The others which I think will have higher weight are the learning environment and student outcomes.

These are not perfect measures. We are on a journey, and I look forward to these metrics being revised and replaced by superior metrics in the future. They are not as bad as we have heard in some of the caricatures of them, and in my experience, if we wait until we have a perfect indicator and then start using it, we will have a very long wait. If we use the indicators that we have, however imperfect, people then work hard to improve them. That is the spirit with which we should approach the TEF today.

--- Later in debate ---

I have heard concerns that bronze might be considered a negative award, but this is not the case in other areas. For example, for the Athena SWAN awards, recognising the advancement of gender equality, or for Investors in People, a bronze award is clearly seen as a badge of high quality, just as it will be in the TEF. We are not, however, complacent about this, and are working with the British Council and others to ensure that TEF ratings are communicated effectively internationally, emphasising the overall high quality of UK provision. We will have a joint communication plan with them in place by the time the TEF ratings are published. I believe this demonstrates the quality above the high baseline that we expect in the UK.

[Baroness Lister of Burtersett]

I am sorry to interrupt, but can the Minister tell us whether there will there be a sub-bronze level, because otherwise, if bronze is the bottom, it is very difficult to see how it will be seen as representing quality?

[Viscount Younger of Leckie]

As I mentioned, there has been a full consultation on this. It came down to the best way forward, which we believe is to have three ratings. I should stress, and hope that I have stressed, that bronze is a good level and is highly respected. I want to make that quite clear to the Committee, and I hope that noble Lords will accept what I have said.