Higher Education: Reform

Baroness Sharp of Guildford Excerpts

Monday 12th November 2012 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Sharp of Guildford]

My Lords, I, too, congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Wills, on launching a very timely debate given today’s announcement by the Council for the Defence of British Universities. Its core principle is to emphasise the public gain from advancing university education. I notice that in an article in the latest Times Higher Education, Sir Keith Thomas states:

“A university education should assist students to develop their intellectual and critical capacities to the full—that is a good in itself, but it will also give them the transferable skills that will be essential in an uncertain future. Scientists and scholars should be permitted to pursue knowledge and understanding of the physical and human world in which we live and to do so for their own sake, regardless of commercial value”.

This echoes the sentiments that the noble Lord, Lord Wills, expressed and takes me back to a report on higher education that I found incredibly valuable when it was published and continue to do so today. It was that of Lord Dearing. In his report, he did his best to define what he and his committee considered to be the four main purposes of higher education. Let me quote them because they link up well this same theme. They are,

“to inspire and enable individuals to develop their capabilities to the highest potential levels throughout life, so that they grow intellectually, are well-equipped for work, can contribute effectively to society and achieve personal fulfilment; to increase knowledge and understanding for their own sake and to foster their application to the benefit of the economy and society; to serve the needs of an adaptable, sustainable, knowledge-based economy at local, regional and national levels; to play a major role in shaping a democratic, civilised, inclusive society”.

That sums up what I would like our university sector to do and I think that this view is shared by a great many people.

One of Lord Dearing’s other principles was that the cost of universities should be shared fairly equally between, first, the individual, who, as he pointed out in his report, benefits in terms of extra earnings; secondly, the Government, because there is public benefit; and, thirdly, employers, because there is a definite benefit to them. His suggestion was that the individual should contribute approximately 25% of the cost. With the introduction of the tuition fees that he proposed in 2001-02, the student contribution rose to just about 20%, with the top-up fees in 2006 taking that increase to 33%—so the individual has been contributing 33% of the cost of teaching and learning for higher education. The current increase, the trebling of tuition fees to £9,000, has taken the individual’s contribution to more than 50%. OECD statistics highlight the fact that the UK even before this increase was spending a lower proportion of its GDP on higher education than most of its competitors, approximately 0.6%. When you compare this with countries that we often seek to emulate such as South Korea, Singapore, the USA and Finland, you see that all of them are spending rather more than 1.5%—in other words, almost three times what we are spending. These figures were taken before the current increase, which will take us even higher. Are we cutting it too fine and putting too much emphasis and burden on the individual student?

I should like to raise two further points about the impact of fees. The first is in relation to mature students, where I worry very much that the drop in numbers has been disproportionate, and the second is in relation to postgraduate students, where, again, the issues raised by the increase in fees are substantial.