Higher Education and Research Bill

Debate between Barry Sheerman and Paul Blomfield

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

[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.

Postgraduate Education

Debate between Barry Sheerman and Paul Blomfield

Wednesday 25th January 2012 Westminster Hall

[Mr Sheerman]

I am happy to do that. The research councils are a brave body of men and women, and they are going through tough times, because they are eking out research grants to many people who need and deserve them. It is a tough time to be entering the postgraduate world. They are in the firing line for saying yes or no, and too often it is no.

[Paul Blomfield (Sheffield Central) (Lab)]

I thank my hon. Friend for giving way on the specific point of the research councils. Will he note the comments by Research Councils UK in 2007—the Minister laughs, but I do not think it would change its view now—when it argued:

“There is a critical need to grow postgraduate research…in the UK in order to counter the demographic ‘time bomb’ of an ageing population of academics in some disciplines”

and that without

“a strategy to address this, there will be serious implications for future retirement and replacement needs”?

There remains a concern that there is no strategy.

[Mr Sheerman]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right, and that is why I keep pleading for higher education to be considered holistically through the career path of senior researchers and academics to retirement, and to consider the demographics of that. My hon. Friend makes the strong point that we must keep refreshing and replenishing that stock all the time. Many of our senior academics are approaching retirement age in a bunch as the demographics work.

When it is announced that one has a debate such as this, information pours in from all over the place. I pay tribute to Universities UK, the Russell group, the ’92 group and others who have furnished me with excellent background material. I was reading about some of the important things that we do in the research community: employer engagement, research, executive education, knowledge transfer, regional partnership building, and so on. But I return to teasing the Minister about the policy vacuum.

Let us look at the history. In March 2010, the Adrian Smith review, “One Step Beyond: Making the most of postgraduate education”, was published. What has happened to it? Sir Adrian has been pulled in—I am sure he did not have be pulled in, but was delighted—to talk to the Minister, who has got his team together again for at least one meeting. Will he enlighten us on whether that review is going anywhere in influencing Government policy? That would be useful.

I want to dwell on the rather dark side of the argument. Higher education and the postgraduate world are heavily dependent on a particular market, and when I was Chair of the Education Committee, I looked at the international market in higher education. The Committee learned that it is intensely competitive. Universities all over the world compete, and five years ago the main competitors were the United States, Australia and emerging countries such as India and China, sometimes in partnership with UK and US universities. It is a very competitive world, and includes Saudi Arabia, India and Germany. The Germans and the Dutch are now teaching postgraduate and undergraduate courses in English to attract a broader audience. If the income from international students were taken out of higher education, we would be in a sad state indeed.

That market is heavily dependent on taught postgraduate work—the one-year or two-year master’s degree. It is highly competitive. As a member of the court of governors of the London School of Economics, I know it very well. It is highly competitive, and there is no cap on fees, which are very competitive. At the lower end, there are some good cheap bargains in higher education in the UK. At the higher end, a business master’s degree in some of our better-known departments of management will cost a lot of money.

Growth in the number of international students, great threat from competition, and—I do not want to be partisan—a slightly clumsily organised change in the visa arrangements have had an impact on some good institutions. I am the first to say that there were some dodgy players pretending to be respectable colleges, and we could have used a little more finesse in weeding out the obvious cowboy operators without impacting on the serious players in higher education, but there is no doubt that visas have been a difficulty, as have the cuts in teaching grants. We have no tuition fee loans for postgraduates, and the research councils cannot help with that.