Higher Education and Research Bill (Second sitting)

Debate between Carol Monaghan and Ben Howlett

Committee Debate: 2nd sitting: House of Commons
Tuesday 6th September 2016 Public Bill Committees

[Ben Howlett (Bath) (Con)]

Q I want to move on to the alternative provider of student finance, which some of the panel have talked about heavily. Given that, over the years, a large number of religious students are not necessarily able to access that funding, I was wondering in terms of the Bill itself whether you support what is being detailed and outlined here, or is there anything that should be enhanced or improved?

Martin Lewis: Certainly on sharia finance, I think it is a very good move towards having an alternative. The provisions need to make sure that there is no benefit or disbenefit in doing so, and that it works on the same basis as for other students. I think that is important, because having been out there talking to people, there is often a question from non-sharia students, “Does this mean that they’re getting a better deal than us?” We do not want to get involved in that type of social division. On a straight basis, certainly having given many, many talks on this issue over the years, every time I go there and there are members of the Islamic faith there, if they are more religious they are disengaged from the student finance process and looking at parents funding them. That is not often possible, because we are talking about large amounts of money and, generally, it is bad finance for anyone to be funding up front—it does not work with the way our system works. Therefore, they are disfranchised from the system, so I wholeheartedly support it—it is something I have asked for in the past. I need to do more work on the exact structure, but presuming it is a sharia-compliant mimic of the existing system, I think it is very good news.

[Carol Monaghan (Glasgow North West) (SNP)]

Q Since tuition fees were trebled in 2012, there is no evidence to suggest that there has been an improvement in either teaching quality or student satisfaction. Do you have concerns that we are tying in TEF to fees and that we could have a situation where there is no benefit for the students involved?

Professor Chris Husbands: To answer that from a TEF point of view, it is worth putting this into a slightly longer term context. Since 1986, when the research selectivity exercise became the research assessment exercise that became the research excellence framework, there has been a performance management regime around research, which is a critical function of universities but only one function. What that has tended to do at some institutional levels is focus attention on career development through research. The bulk of university income, for virtually all universities, is from teaching. What the TEF is designed to do is provide a framework that encourages universities to focus on teaching quality, in much the same way that the REF has encouraged them to focus on research quality. The fees issue is absolutely critical. What the tripling of fees for students did in 2012 was not to shift the amount of resource going to universities, because the fee backfilled the loss of T-grant. At some point, we as a sector are going to need to look at fee increases, because if there is a fixed fee against rising costs, essentially fees have been falling since 2012. What we are interested in the TEF doing is providing a mechanism for focusing attention on quality at a time when we need to look at the way in which the fee increases to meet rising costs.

Higher Education and Research Bill (First sitting)

Debate between Carol Monaghan and Ben Howlett

Committee Debate: 1st sitting: House of Commons
Tuesday 6th September 2016 Public Bill Committees

[Ben Howlett (Bath) (Con)]

Q One of the key areas of regulation proposed in the Bill obviously relates to participation, and for a long time social mobility has been lacking in many areas of the regulatory system.

I want to unpick a bit, following on from the last question, your views on the Government’s ambitions for improving participation and also the regulatory framework around improving participation.

Professor Simon Gaskell: I speak as head of an institution where two thirds of our students are from ethnic minorities and 89% are from state schools, so I can speak with some authority on this. That of course is a set of achievements of which we are very proud and that have been achieved in the current framework—regulatory and otherwise.

My personal view is that widening participation is not enough. We need to do much more and indeed we are doing more at Queen Mary to ensure that students not only get into university and succeed academically while they are at university but, despite a lack of social capital in many cases, succeed after university. There is a lot to be done and we are doing it in universities. I do not think it needs legislation to enforce it.

We have had encouragement through the Office for Fair Access, which has been entirely aligned with our aspirations as an institution. Other institutions have perhaps needed more encouragement in that direction. Fundamentally, I think some universities at least, including my own, are leading the way in recognising what needs to be done in social mobility. Widening participation is not enough.

Pam Tatlow: We support the Government’s ambitions 101% and we would add that experience to that of board members to be taken into account.

We think clause 9, which deals with some of the participation figures and information, does not go far enough and, in fact, it should discuss some of the protected characteristics. It does not talk about age: one in three higher education students enter university for the first time when they are over 21, often entering modern universities. That must be reflected in the diversity of the sector. We are proud of that and should do more about it and, therefore, I think more could be done on clause 9.

Professor Joy Carter: Widening the market to alternative providers is often good for widening participation students, because many alternative providers focus on WP students and offer products and prices that are particularly attractive to them. That is good.

My concern about the marketplace and the effect on WP is about the work at primary school and the work of individual institutions at primary school. There is a lot of research that says young people are made or broken at that age and lots of universities already do fantastic work with primary-age children. In the new world allowed by the Bill, how much of that will continue?

Paul Kirkham: Obviously we support this ambition. Independent providers are, traditionally, very good at this in the main. Where you have a fee cap of £6,000 you have two choices: either you deliver a different kind of experience or you have to charge cash, up front, to students, which is not exactly a widening participation exercise. In many cases, we are disadvantaged in the work we can do when we would like to do it given that we have that fee cap of £6,000, but we understand the reasons why that is there.

[Carol Monaghan]

Q The OFS as the regulating body will be funded by subscriptions from higher education institutions. New providers or new entrants, by their nature, will be a higher risk than the more established institutions. Is it right that all institutions pay the same amount of subscriptions or should there be some sort of sliding scale?

Professor Simon Gaskell: Some thought needs to be given to this because you are right, not every institution will require the same degree of scrutiny. You could argue that the most established and most reliable institutions should pay least. To be fair, there is some offset against that, building on my earlier point: we are all concerned with the reputation of the sector and we all have an interest in the sector. I would not suggest an exact proportionality, but some system that takes note that the greatest demands on the OFS will come from the providers who represent the greatest risk seems to me a reasonable principle.

Pam Tatlow: I understand there will be a consultation if this remains in the Bill, but the more general point is that this is a direct switch from funding from what is now the Department for Education to universities and the average would be about £62,000. If you look at the White Paper, it shows that over several years, the bulk of funding for the OFS will come from providers.

Paul Kirkham: To be clear, not all independent providers are new and pose that kind of risk. Many have decades, if not hundreds of years, of experience in provision. My second point is that it should be equitable in terms of the cost. Many of the incumbent universities’ perceived lower risks have been achieved through decades of taxpayer support and I think it would be grossly unfair if a sliding scale were applied on the basis of some form of perceived risk.

Gordon McKenzie: As well as risk, it is also important to take account of a university or a provider’s size and resources.