DRAFT HIGHER EDUCATION (TRANSPARENCY CONDITION AND FINANCIAL SUPPORT) (ENGLAND) REGULATIONS 2018

Gordon Marsden Excerpts

Tuesday 23rd October 2018 General Committees

[Gordon Marsden (Blackpool South) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Sir Christopher. May I give my profuse apologies to you and the Minister for being slightly late this morning; I was stuck for 40 minutes on a Network Rail train.

We welcome the Minister’s introducing the regulations for discussion today. We largely agree with him on the importance of widening participation and access to our higher education institutions and providers and the part that these transparency conditions can and should play. The devil is in the detail, however, and though there may be consensus on their importance, we disagree about some aspects of what should be included in these conditions, which are not included now. I will therefore try to persuade the Minister to strengthen them as much as possible. Before I do that, I must revisit what I said in 2016, when we discussed this clause and amendments that we tabled for the Minister’s predecessor. We said that the transparency duty was to be welcomed, but that there was a serious oversight in restricting the categories that higher education institutions had to publish information on participation. In particular, we said that there was no valid reason why data on students with disabilities, and the age profile of students, should not be included. We then tabled amendments to insert data on students with disabilities and care leavers and on students’ age profile.

It is absolutely essential that more work is done to reduce unequal access and success in higher education. Supporting people at all ages, not just at 18, is key. Overall social mobility is down, not up. The total number of English undergraduate entrants from low participation areas fell by 17% between 2011-12 and 2016-17. As a result, 12,600 fewer English undergraduate students from low participation areas started university courses each year than in 2011/12. So adding age and disability, as the Open University, Ruskin, the WEA, Birkbeck and a host of other adult education providers have said, is a way in which we can drive forward social mobility. Including age will encourage HEIs to promote the participation of older students as well as provide a further spotlight on the number of adults participating in HE.

Making it compulsory to publish data about the access, participation and attainment of disabled students will not only improve transparency but encourage HEIs to take greater responsibility to work towards eliminating the disabled student attainment gap. Is that not an important aspect of what the Government are trying to do by addressing the disability employment gap? They need not only to act on the recommendations on learning disability in the Maynard report, which was convened by my constituency neighbour, the hon. Member for Blackpool North and Cleveleys (Paul Maynard), who is also a member of the Government, but to look at the format and implications of the gap.

I know that the OfS has just closed its consultation window on access and participation plans, which included asking whether respondents agreed or disagreed that it should explore requiring providers to submit and publish transparency data by age and disability. To what extent does the Minister agree or disagree that the OfS should do that? His colleague, Viscount Younger, said from the Front Bench in the House of Lords that “a good case” had been made,

“for the inclusion of age as a characteristic and I am sympathetic to his aims. Although I cannot pre-empt the consultation, I am prepared to say from the Dispatch Box that we fully anticipate that age will be part of the information the OfS will ask institutions to publish.”—[Official Report, House of Lords, 4 April 2017; Vol. 782, c. 1001.]

What is the Minister’s reflection on that?

The third issue that we raised was that of care leavers, which has come up as a consistent theme across Government policy over the past few years. Ministers in the Department have been strong on supporting care leavers, and we think that it is important to add that category to the list, even though it is a relatively small and modest group. We also believe that, if the transparency duty is to have any impact, it needs to include as many different dimensions of participation as possible by social background. That view was echoed strongly by the Sutton Trust, which did not believe that the Bill and the regulations went far enough in that area. It said,

“evidence suggests many universities are favouring more privileged candidates even when levels of attainment are taken into account…The Bill should be amended to require universities to publish their contextual admission policies clearly on their websites”.

What recent discussions did the Minister have with the Sutton Trust and with the National Education Opportunities Network before the regulations before Parliament today were published on the need to strengthen them further?

The trade union for academics and other university workers, the University and College Union, has also said that mandatory reporting requirements should be extended to cover key workforce data that has the potential to impact on the quality of students’ education, such as the use of insecure contracts and student-staff ratios. Will the Minister consider including those in further regulations that might come before the House in relation to transparency and fair access? How often will the conditions be reviewed?

Having read through the explanatory memorandum, I have a few specific observations and questions for the Minister on the regulations we are discussing today. Paragraph 2.1 confirms that the OfS,

“must ensure that the ongoing registration conditions of each registered higher education provider...includes a transparency condition.”

Although we too think it is important that all approved institutions are required to have transparency commitments, could the Minister expand on the timeframe for those to be put in place? This is not only relevant to new institutions, but to all of our existing higher education institutions, and therefore the logistics are bound to be challenging. Can the Minister tell us within what timeframe all institutions should meet those expectations, and does he agree with the University and College Union and others that all providers should be required to produce an access and participation plan, not just a statement, as is currently the case for the approved category?

I do not wish to be unkind, but paragraphs 3.3 and 3.7 of the explanatory memorandum make me think that the Minister may have in the Department a budding Lewis Carroll. The opening sentence of paragraph 3.3 says:

“The Department notes that this instrument contains reference to a document that does not exist yet but is of the view that it is necessary to refer to it for the following reasons.”

That is not exactly the famous phrase from “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland”, “Sentence first—verdict afterwards”, but clearly there is an issue in relation to how that will be taken forward. Can the Minister update us on the progress on producing that regime?

Paragraph 3.7 states that

“an institution can only be registered on the OfS register…if it is, or intends to become, an English higher education provider.”

Paragraph 3.9 explains the place of education in the devolved legislation competence of Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales. That is true in terms of the specifics of the regulation, but the Minister will be aware that tens of thousands of students from Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales will be at English universities and therefore subject to the provisions. Can the Minister tell us what discussions have been had with his counterparts in the devolved Administrations on that?

Paragraphs 7.1 and 7.2 of the explanatory memorandum state that

“although as of 2017 there are record numbers of 18 year olds entering higher education and the entry rate for the most disadvantaged English 18 year olds (measured by POLAR) has increased to 20.4%, it is considered that there is still more work to be done to reduce unequal access and success in higher education…In this context, the Department is of the view that greater transparency is one of the best tools available to drive social mobility.”

Indeed it is, but it also essential that a broad range of measures on socioeconomic background are looked at. Commenting on today’s statutory instrument, the Sutton Trust said to me:

“It is important that the OfS don’t just consider POLAR, as socio-economic disadvantage is complex and multi-dimensional. We think that the OfS should use a number of different measures, including POLAR, MEM”—

I am awfully sorry, but I have not got my head around that particular acronym—

“and free-school meal eligibility, FSM, so that there isn’t an overreliance on one specific measure.”

I hope that the Minister and his officials will muse upon that.

As I say, financial support is essential for widening participation. With that in mind, and given the clear priority to drive social mobility, do the Government still intend, as was outlined in the 2015 spending review, to cut the widening participation funding of the Higher Education Funding Council for England, as it then was, by up to 50% by the end of the spending review period?

The OfS is set to review all its funding allocations next year after the post-18 review has reported. The Open University has said that the part-time student premium, as part of its widening participation funding, is essential to those higher education institutions that do the heavy lifting in relation to social mobility, so as to deliver on access and student support for widening participation students. Can the Minister confirm that the Government will protect that?

On the consultation outcome, the explanatory memorandum to the regulations says:

“Sufficient input from the sector was received during the above consultations to inform policy development.”

I understand that the consultation took place under a previous Government, and indeed a previous Department—the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills—but, in relation to these regulations and others that will come as a consequence of the 2017 Act, does the Minister consider that the Government have consulted widely enough with the people who use the system? I believe, as many in the sector do, that it is inadequate to consult simply the HEIs. There should also be some input from student organisations, qualification providers and employers.

On access and participation, we should all be concerned about not just the input but the output—how many disadvantaged students complete the course—and the outcome: the jobs and futures they move to. I appreciate that it is difficult for the Government to do any major longitudinal studies at this stage of proceedings, but I would like the Minister to give attention to that in relation to both these regulations and what will come out as a result.

Finally, I turn to the issues touched on in paragraph 12 of the explanatory memorandum on monitoring and review. We are told that the Department will ask the OfS

“to monitor the effectiveness of the condition in delivering the policy aims to widen participation in higher education and identify whether changes should be considered.”

Again, we agree. It is important to monitor the impact of conditions placed on providers, but the big question is what capacity the OfS will have to do that effectively. I say that deliberately, without straying from the narrow terms of the regulations, because at the Higher Education and Research Bill Committee we expressed concerns about the stand-alone nature of the new director for fair access and participation. The Minister will know that previously that director had his own establishment outwith the OfS, whereas now he is essentially in it. I am not commenting on whether he has enough people working for him; essentially he is not in charge of his department and it is up to the OfS to give him the tools to finish the job.

While we are talking about tools, Universities UK has raised concerns with me about the regulations. I do not know whether it made this request directly to the Minister or indirectly through his officials, but from the note I have had it is clear that it wants to see more information on the level of detail that institutions will have to submit for access reports and action plans. We know that the OfS has been given a risk-based approach to intervening on institutions, so can more information be provided on what the methodology for that will be? UUK also asks whether the Government will ensure that the OfS engages with the sector on defining the roles and the self-assessment tool, which will have to cope with a broad range of potential providers, including small and specialist institutions.

In connection with that, I have to say that the Government’s job, the Minister’s job and particularly the OfS’s job would have been greatly strengthened if the previous Government had not taken the inexplicable decision to get rid of the UK Commission for Employment and Skills, which was of major assistance in providing longitudinal and attitudinal advice. The Government now find themselves having to commission bespoke assessments, which we and many people in the sector believe are an inadequate way of examining the issues. I accept that we are where we are, but that point lends weight to the concerns of UUK and individual HE providers.

With those observations, I will draw my remarks to a conclusion. I repeat that we strongly support the principle of the draft regulations and their direction of travel, but that as they are implemented—I accept that registration is a rolling process—we would like to hear more from the Minister and the Department to satisfy our concerns.