Postgraduate Education

Gavin Shuker Excerpts

Wednesday 25th January 2012 Westminster Hall

[Gavin Shuker (Luton South) (Lab/Co-op)]

I am particularly grateful, Mr Hollobone, to serve under your chairmanship, and also that you have taken out the bulk of my speech by mentioning those historic victories by the Hatters over Kettering.

Many of my colleagues in the Opposition have raised pertinent points, and I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Huddersfield (Mr Sheerman) on obtaining the debate. I want particularly to focus on a couple of areas linked to my experience. I am grateful that I do not have to declare an interest. I am not a postgraduate graduate—or rather, I suppose I should say I am not a postgraduate. If I had been to university for postgraduate education I might have known the exact way to say that. I was born in Luton and went to Cambridge to attend one of the finest universities in the country. [Interruption.] Indeed—I will not repeat the remark made from a sedentary position. I really enjoyed my time at Cambridge, but chose to move back to Luton. When I left, the university of Luton was established; today it is the university of Bedfordshire. Alongside the other modern universities in this country, the university of Bedfordshire is doing incredible work in the postgraduate field. I think that sometimes a lazy shorthand is employed by people who perhaps are not as engaged in the debate as the hon. Members present today, who assume that the bulk of postgraduate education goes on in Russell group universities. The role of modern universities today is hugely interesting. My wife, Lucie, who would want me to point out that she is much smarter than I am, has spent most of the past decade in postgraduate education, and is now a research fellow at the university of Bedfordshire. I met her at the university of Cambridge, and I have witnessed at first hand the work done by the funding councils. I am grateful for it, having been a penniless student myself for most of my twenties.

The broader context of the debate is hugely important. The first thing to say is that there is a growing requirement for graduate qualifications, and Labour colleagues have raised that issue already. We need to compete with the world and that requires us to expand graduate qualifications in this country.

There is high graduate unemployment and underemployment. We know that this crisis is particularly affecting young people in the economic situation that we are in. Upskilling and obtaining graduate qualifications can be a good route through which to ensure that we—as an economy and as individuals—are able to pull out of the nosedive that we are in.

However, the 80% cut in teaching funding has also knocked on to affect postgraduate teaching, even though it was directly aimed at undergraduate teaching. In a sense, there are no Chinese walls. Many of the teachers at postgraduate level are also working in the undergraduate field. When we lose a teacher, or a teaching place, that loss is felt right across the university sector.

Of course, it is worth pointing out that the Government draw from the pool of postgraduate education and, in many cases, directly fund postgraduate education. I do not know if it is in order, Mr Hollobone, to speculate on the number of doctorates held by people in Westminster Hall today, including the civil servants and Clerks, but I will. I know that there are certainly MPs in Westminster Hall who are “doctors”, but I also know how little help they would be if I stubbed my toe on the way out. I am sure that there are people with doctorates and other postgraduate qualifications present right here in Westminster Hall, who feed directly into the machinery of Government.

Let us also look, for example, at the Department for Education, which directly funds the postgraduate certificate in education. We are already seeing that there are changes being made in that system, for instance the reduction in bursaries. Similarly, the Health and Social Care Bill will take away the requirement to train and develop doctors, nurses and others from the strategic health authorities, and it will pass that requirement to GPs.

In the broader context, therefore, a lot is changing in the postgraduate world. There is not only the reduction in funding to consider but the direct action that the Government can take to fund postgraduate qualifications.

Much of the training for those qualifications takes place in our modern-day universities. My hon. Friend the Member for Huddersfield made a very good point when he said that even if there is not a policy vacuum right now—perhaps there is a series of ideas that are being worked through to an ultimate conclusion, which we will hear about in time—it seems that there has been much focus on undergraduate education and much less focus on postgraduate education.

I spoke about modern universities right at the start of my contribution. What do they do? They support a large number of postgraduates; about two in five postgraduate qualifications are gained in our modern universities. They also provide much greater support to part-time graduate students than older universities; they are the ideal place for part-time students to be working in the postgraduate field, so that they can put their skills back into business and learn on the job, as it were. One in two of the postgraduate qualifications obtained by part-time students is obtained at a modern university. And modern universities also support older students, more so than, say, Russell group universities, which are at the other end of the scale for teaching older students. About 40% of the postgraduate students that modern universities teach are over 35.

In addition, modern universities are more likely to reach students from minority ethnic backgrounds and communities; I see that in my own local university, the university of Bedfordshire. Modern universities have also been proven to do very well in identifying new markets, such as creative industries. Postgraduate qualifications can add something to those sectors and to the economy more broadly.

There are a number of things that can be done, and I hope that the Minister will respond in detail to my points when he winds up. At the moment, however, the situation feels a bit shapeless and baggy. Nevertheless, there is one idea that has a lot of traction—it is the idea of bringing in more funding directly from industry and enterprise.

That idea—of bringing private funding into the system—was made earlier in the debate, and it is a brilliant idea. In fact, I am very disappointed that the Browne review did not pick it up and run with it much more on the undergraduate side; I think that we have been quite vocal about that during the last 18 months.

Whatever system we come up with to ensure that our postgraduate education is among the best in the world—that it is adequately funded and that it reaches the students that we want it to, and not only those people who can feel they can afford postgraduate education or who feel a great expectation on them to study at postgraduate level, but a whole range of demographics—it is really important that the Government play a role in ensuring that the funding for that system is available to all students, regardless of where they choose to study and how they study.

My own preference is quite clear—there are obvious economic benefits in ensuring that funding is protected and enhanced. Where there is private funding, however, it should be the role of Government to ensure that it is available to all, regardless of where they choose to study. For example, a postgraduate student support and loan scheme might be a way forward, but we do not want banks simply shifting towards cherry-picking those students they believe have the best chance of earning significant sums in the future, based on the university that students attend or their background.

A loan scheme should be available to all postgraduate students, regardless of whether they are full-time or part-time students, regardless of their income and regardless of their credit rating or background. If the Government choose to go down the route of having a loan scheme, they should consider making it available to all students across the field.

In summary, I have three “asks” for the Minister and I wonder whether he might briefly comment on them. The first “ask” is quite simple; it is about improving the quality of the data that we collect about postgraduate students. Even in the time that I spent researching postgraduate education for this debate, I clearly noticed how little data we have on the types of students who are coming through. With the big funding changes at undergraduate level, it is all the more important that we start looking at the income, background, ethnicity, student profile and level of debt that people are coming into the sector with, so that we can see whether any changes being made by this Government are working well.

My second “ask” of the Minister is to ask him simply to acknowledge both the interdependency between the postgraduate world and the undergraduate world, and the fact that the 80% cut in the teaching budget will have an effect on postgraduate education as well as on undergraduate education. Indeed, I also ask him to acknowledge the point made by Labour colleagues that the cost of postgraduate education may also go up, just as the cost of undergraduate education has.

My third “ask” of the Minister is to ask him to commit to delivering an equitable scheme that is accessible to all postgraduate students—even if is privately funded or supported—to ensure that all of our universities have the chance, the role, the ability and the privilege of providing postgraduate education and qualifications, regardless of where they are located or the courses they run.