Higher Education and Research Bill

Barry Sheerman Excerpts

2nd reading: House of Commons & Money resolution: House of Commons & Programme motion: House of Commons & Ways and Means resolution: House of Commons
Tuesday 19th July 2016 Commons Chamber

[Jo Churchill]

I agree that some of it is coming from the European Union. I am not sure whether the Government need to, or will be able to, dip into their pocket to assure that. They must look at possibly more exciting ways of loaning between business and universities, and stimulating particular areas and sectors in order that they contribute to driving the skills base forward. As my hon. Friend the Member for Taunton Deane (Rebecca Pow) said, we have many high-powered industries in this country—nuclear, pharmaceuticals, and so on—that are more than adept at this. Indeed, I have spoken to the Minister about our telecoms industry, which is more than adept at putting some of its own money into ensuring that skills come through. While I would agree that there needs to be some certainty, I would not necessarily say that it should come purely from Government.

Innovations in life sciences, pharmaceuticals and the 100,000 Genomes Project show that a strong university sector is key to both the health and the wealth of our nation. Organisations have a large part to play. Businesses want skills, but in order to build them up they must communicate more with the higher and further education sectors. They are playing an increasingly important part in our university institutions.

Last year, one of my daughters graduated across the river, and this week another graduated in Lancaster, which I consider to be truly northern. Another of my daughters is in Newcastle, and another is waiting to go—[Interruption.] I could go on for ages. I have a vast amount of experience visiting university campuses across the UK, although not so much those in Scotland. I am constantly amazed by, for example, Heston Blumenthal’s interaction with the University of Reading and Tata’s interaction with the University of Warwick, which underpin the importance of the relationship between business and universities. Such relationships are already in place and the Bill builds on them, makes them more transparent and develops the connection between further and higher education and business. Our focus on teaching and research allows us to provide opportunities for businesses with specific needs. In his review, Sir Paul Nurse asked for coherence, and I want the Minister to drive that into the Bill.

We have a chance to export education and improve research collaborations. We need to ensure that marketisation is monitored and that there is no oversupply. Although competition is good, oversupply can lead to the problems that have been mentioned. If there is too much freedom in a market, deliverers will always pick the easy route, so there must be an assurance that the low-hanging fruit will not be taken. I have spoken to vice-chancellors this week and our home universities are already looking for students with lower grades to fill the spaces left by EU students who have fallen away. We need to be aware of that and ensure that oversupply does not lead to a downgrade in quality.

Turning to social mobility, any graduate—my daughters, for example—will be in the marketplace for 50 years. That is an awfully long time and not one person who comes to this place will have had the same job for 50 years. We need to take a more flexible approach. We have spoken too much about the young—important though they are and mother of loads as I am—but mature students and part-time students also have needs. The right hon. Member for Tottenham (Mr Lammy) mentioned the statistics for Oxford and Cambridge, but he failed to take account of the fact—this is the crux of the argument—that some of the young people to whom I speak in my constituency are looked-after children, family carers and mothers. They do not have the flexibility just to choose a university. That is why reputation, quality and availability are so important. This is not about being able to go to top-flight universities; it is about being enabled to rise.

[Mr Barry Sheerman (Huddersfield) (Lab/Co-op)]

The hon. Lady stimulates me to intervene. It is very dangerous to talk about top-flight universities. I represent Huddersfield, which has a wonderful university with some of the best departments in the country, including for design, innovation and engineering. It is very easy to say what is top flight and what is not. Many of our departments are better than those at Cambridge, and I am sitting next to my hon. Friend the Member for Cambridge (Daniel Zeichner).

[Jo Churchill]

Indeed you are. The words “top flight” came from the top of my head and I fully agree with the hon. Gentleman. My daughters have enjoyed red brick universities, but my friends’ children have been to all manner of providers, including good further education colleges and good apprenticeship schemes. There are fewer degree apprentices at the moment, because that system has not filtered through. More than anything, people need the appropriate qualifications.

I do not want to go on about the statistics around white young men and those from black and minority ethnic backgrounds, because they speak for themselves. I would instead like to articulate the situation of career changers: mature members of our society who, in their 30s and 40s, when they have mortgages and children, want to change careers. That includes the nurses who want to become doctors, and the parliamentarians who want to become teachers.

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[Mr Deputy Speaker (Mr Lindsay Hoyle)]

Order. Will the Front Benchers take note of this? The hon. Member for Sheffield Central (Paul Blomfield) is making reference to the Front Benchers, and they appear to be having a conversation. I am sure that everybody wants to hear what the hon. Gentleman wants to say.

[Mr Sheerman]

My hon. Friend was trying to be nice.

[Paul Blomfield]

I will continue to be nice, because I recognise the thought and effort that the Minister has put into developing the Bill. I commend him for the way in which he has listened to those across the sector and other stakeholders in shifting thinking, as discourse has moved forward. There is a lot more listening to do, because there are still a number of reservations.

The Bill raises some very important issues: on teaching quality, clearly; on widening participation; on reopening the debate on credit accumulation and transfer; and on several other areas. Sadly, however, as other hon. Members have highlighted, those are not necessarily the key challenges for the sector right now. The Secretary of State was right to say in her opening remarks that our university system punches above its weight. Our universities are hugely important in the transformational impact they have on those who study in them, in building the skills base of our country and in contributing over £11 billion to our export earnings, and this hugely successful sector of course contributes through research and innovation to the wider development of our economy. We have one of the world’s best university systems, but universities face real challenges, many of which, frankly, are not covered by the Bill.

Let me turn back to Brexit. The hon. Member for Bury St Edmunds said that we should look at the opportunities of Brexit. Whether we describe them as opportunities or as challenges, there are real issues to face. She highlighted the fact that we are in the top 10 for research. One reason for that is the enormous funding we have had through FP7—Horizon 2020, as it is now—from the European Union. The EU is spending about £70 billion through Horizon 2020, and until 23 June more was allocated to British-led partnerships than to any other member state. Without that, our research capacity will be deeply affected, with huge economic consequences.

The Minister will recall that I asked him, just days after the Brexit vote, what action he was taking to protect that funding. Reassuringly, he said that we should not worry about anything for the next couple of years because we would still be in the European Union and fully accessing Horizon 2020. That was not an unreasonable answer at that moment—I would have probably given the same one—but when I talked to the vice-chancellors of my two universities in Sheffield two days later, they both reported that locally led research teams had been asked to pull out of trans-European projects bidding for Horizon 2020, because a UK research teams would be a drag on securing funding, given all the associated uncertainty. Mike Galsworthy, who is the director of Scientists for EU, has been trying to monitor the impact on research. He reports that already—just a couple of weeks on—of the 378 responses he has received from research teams, over a quarter are reporting difficulties because everyone fears the risk of having a team from non-EU Britain as a partner.

The Government therefore need, and I hope that the Minister will address this when he winds up, to consider urgently—more urgently than many of the other issues covered by the Bill—what he intends to do to offset the impact we are already seeing. He should commit to underwriting all Horizon 2020 funding to give research teams the reassurance that they can go forward confidently without letting down their partners. He should also talk to those quite close to him—[Interruption] I was thinking of a different form of relationship, but that one will do—about making an early commitment to putting Horizon 2020 at the top of the agenda in our negotiations on what post-Brexit Britain will look like.

The second issue is about recruiting and retaining talent. Between our two universities in Sheffield, there are 406 EU nationals on a salary of less than £35,000. That figure is important because it means that they would not meet the criteria for successful tier 2 visa applications. These are early-career academics—the talent of the future—who will be driving the research and the teaching quality of the future in our universities. Unless we can give them the confidence that they and their successors from European countries can come to this country to work, teach and research in our universities, we will be severely weakening our talent base.

Such issues are not addressed in the Bill, but it threatens to do more damage in the third area of concern in universities, which is international students—an issue on which the Minister and I agree, and about which many Government Members have made the same point. As the right hon. Member for East Devon (Mr Swire) pointed out, the Home Office has done enormous damage to our ability to compete in the growing international marketplace to recruit international students. Brexit threatens greater damage in relation not just to the 185,000 EU students who are here, but to the 320,000 or so non-EU students. Hobsons, the major international student recruitment consultants, reported just a couple of weeks before the Brexit vote that about a third of non-EU nationals considering coming to the UK would find Britain a less attractive place to study if it exited the European Union, and one can understand why.

The Bill could make the situation worse by undermining the strength of the UK’s university brand through the teaching excellence framework. A one-level TEF might not have that consequence, because it would be a straightforward exercise that, subject to ticking certain boxes, most universities would glide through. However, the subsequent grading system creates a risk of brand damage, because we are developing it unilaterally. If we were measuring our universities equitably in parallel and in partnership with every country in the world, perhaps it would be different, but we are not. We are stepping outside what our competitors are doing and saying that we will spotlight our universities in a very different way. We will say that some are okay, some are outstanding and some are excellent. That will send out the message about those that do not reach the very top grade that international students ought to think twice about going there. I appreciate that that is not the Government’s intention, but it is a potential consequence that they need to consider closely. We already have a quality assurance system through the Quality Assurance Agency for Higher Education that is widely respected around the world.

If the Government are going down the TEF route, let us get it right. The thinking on this is significantly underdeveloped. I welcome the way in which, during the discussion about teaching quality, the Minister has moved away from an overdependence on quantitative metrics towards a more qualitative approach that involves institutions in the assessment process. However, there is still a focus on quantitative metrics that, as other Members have highlighted, are deeply flawed.

Employment destination is a key metric, but we all know that that is an unsatisfactory way of measuring teaching quality. Someone who comes from the right family, goes to the right school, goes to the right university and comes out with a passable degree will get a good job, because they have the contacts. [Interruption.] I did not catch the Minister’s observation, but I have no doubt he will make his point later. Employment destination might be a measure of the privilege someone was born into, but it is not a measure of teaching quality. We know that privately educated students are more likely to get a good degree than state educated students. We also know that graduate destination can be affected by the regional economy, so it is a very unsatisfactory metric.

In trying to widen participation, I admire the Government’s focus not simply on entry to university, but on success at university and beyond. However, using retention as a metric is potentially flawed, because the easiest way—I am not for a moment suggesting that any of our universities would do this—to get a good retention score is not to accept students who are likely to fail.