Education Bill

Baroness Perry of Southwark Excerpts

Tuesday 4th October 2011 Grand Committee

[Lord Lucas]

I beg to move Amendment 146 and speak to Amendment 147A. My objective is to nudge the Government gently in the direction of common sense and fairness in these two amendments. One of the effects of the Government’s policies over the last year or two, particularly with regard to the Office for Fair Access, which looks set to reduce the number of students going from high-performing English schools to Oxford and Cambridge by about 500 a year, and as an effect of the fees increase, has seen a very considerable rise in interest in the prospect of going to university overseas.

At the cheaper level, it costs about a couple of thousand pounds plus living expenses to get a very decent university education in the Netherlands. That is becoming an increasingly popular destination, notably for the leafier end of the state school system. I thoroughly recommend Maastricht as a university, begging the pardon of my more sensitive colleagues on these Benches. It is actually a very fine and innovative university, and for those parents who would intend anyway to repay their children’s debt, and not leave them with that hanging over them, it represents a very considerable saving.

To have our children going abroad anyway is probably quite a good thing for this country, and over the long term it should increase our understanding of the world outside our shores, and bring us added understanding, if not prosperity. At the higher end, principally affected by the changes being made in OFFA, we are seeing very substantial increases in numbers of students interested in going to the United States. The rate of application is up by about 30 per cent this year. Fees in the US are extremely substantial. There are some good scholarships available. Some of the brighter state comprehensives have been picking up one or two of them, and long may that continue. However, a lot of this outflow will be children who have gone to independent schools, whose parents see that they have the qualifications that would formerly have taken them to top universities, but who have now been squeezed out—so they are off to America, Canada, Australia or, indeed, China. You can get to some very high-ranking universities in Hong Kong for not much more than the cost of a British degree. Indeed, one of them is a subsidiary of Nottingham University. So you can pay to go to a British university overseas. It seems a bit daft to me that our own universities, which are strapped for cash enough as it is, should see this flow of students going out to pay high fees overseas and not be able to bring them back and have those fees for themselves. Why should we deny our universities that benefit? Why should our students find that the only universities in the world that they cannot pay a fee for are our own universities and why should our universities find that a natural flow of students is denied to them? So I hope, while not expecting any immediate comfort today, that the Government will think along those lines.

I would like to see some progress today on Amendment 147A. It has long been the practice of universities, when students were largely funded by the Government, to rob Peter to pay Paul—to take money that was notionally allocated to students studying humanities degrees and use it to fund courses being pursued by those studying science degrees, in particular. That is all very well when it is just reallocating government money, but when you are taking money that a student has invested themselves and transferring it away from that student to some other student’s course, I think that that becomes morally indefensible. I would very much like to see any such activity done openly and with a proper disclosure of what a student is receiving in return for their fees and where the money is being spent by the university. Then a student who is looking to go on what has been traditionally a rather underprovided course with few contact hours can see whether or not they are being offered a reasonable bargain in return for their £9,000 a year. I beg to move.

[Baroness Perry of Southwark]

My name is also on Amendment 146 and I very much support what my noble friend has said. I shall add one or two other arguments to the powerful arguments that he has already made.

My noble friend said that losing some of our good students to go abroad for their studies might be a good thing. Yes, it would be good for a few. International education, whether at undergraduate or graduate level, is a well established tradition among the brighter and best students, and that is a good thing. But it is a very foolish country that stands aside and watches a very large number of its brightest and best students being lost, particularly since those who go to the United States tend to stay. There are good statistics showing this. We lose some of our best talent if we allow them to go and finish their undergraduate and postgraduate study there and then be snapped up by American companies.

The other argument that has always seemed to me quite powerful is that we have and recognise in this country, without much debate, that we have private schools as well as state schools. We know perfectly well the way in which private school fees have been accelerating in recent years. Many parents are now paying £12,000 or £13,000 per year for day schools, if they are lucky—some more than that—and, for boarding schools, at least double that. It has always seemed very strange that those same parents whose children go on to higher education are suddenly released from what many of us see as the burden of school fees to a very much reduced sum of money. I have many times dwelt with friends on one anecdote from my time as head of a Cambridge college. One of my fresher students came bouncing up to me in the first week of term and said, “Oh, come and look at what my daddy has given me as a present for coming up to university”. It was a brand new BMW 7 Series, which would have accounted for at least three years of fees at £9,000 a year plus, or her maintenance. I thought, yes, Daddy is celebrating because he does not have to pay your very high school fees any longer. I am sure that my college and university could have done with that money and made good use of it.

It seems quite extraordinary that we do not allow parents—who could very well afford to continue to pay the fees—simply to opt their children out of the entire loans company system and, therefore, to have their children treated like overseas students, where the university can set their fees and they are outwith the quota for those eligible for loans. Putting these very bright students off-quota and giving them the encouragement and opportunity to go to our best universities would be to their benefit and hugely to the benefit of the country. Therefore, I wholly hope that the Government will seriously consider this possibility of having private students who would be off-quota but who of course would have exactly the same entry requirements as those who are eligible for loans. As my noble friend says, we do not expect an answer today. This is not a backdoor route for people to buy their way into higher education. Their access arrangements and entry requirements would have to be exactly the same. But it would enable us to keep some of those very bright young people here in British universities.

[Lord Foulkes of Cumnock]

My Lords, I was hoping that the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, was going to refer to what has been the most discriminatory and unfair decision in relation to student fees ever, anywhere in the United Kingdom. This is the decision by the Scottish Government to charge students domiciled in England, Wales or Northern Ireland who choose to study at Scottish universities fees of up to £9,000 a year. As the professor, my old principal, will know—though he was not principal when I was a student; he is not that old—if the Scottish Government are allowed to go ahead with what they are planning, English, Welsh and Northern Irish students will have to pay £36,000 for a four-year degree course at a Scottish university. It is really outrageous. It is particularly outrageous because of the rules of the European Union, whereby students coming from other countries in the European Union—whether it be Lithuania, Poland or any other country in the European Union—will get a free education just like Scottish students. I do not understand how anyone in England can sit back and accept this. I do not know why people are not rioting in the streets at this kind of discriminatory decision.

However, there will be an opportunity to put it right. I have tabled an amendment to the Scotland Bill, which means that this sovereign United Kingdom Parliament would make it illegal for the Scottish Administration to charge discriminatory fees. We are still the supreme Parliament. The Scottish Parliament is a devolved Parliament. I hope that all noble Lords will talk to their colleagues and that, for once, I might get support from all sides of the House—that would be a novelty—so that we can end the discrimination that is being proposed by the SNP in the Scottish Parliament.