Access to Postgraduate Study (Oxford University)

Debate between Hazel Blears and Lord Willetts

Wednesday 23rd January 2013 Commons Chamber

[The Minister for Universities and Science (Mr David Willetts)]

I congratulate the right hon. Member for Salford and Eccles (Hazel Blears) on raising this issue. Let me immediately agree with her that it involves some very important wider issues, to which I shall turn shortly. I hope she will appreciate, however, that although she has spoken about her constituent Damien Shannon in conditions of parliamentary privilege—and I have read about him in the newspapers as well—a legal case is pending as a result of a dispute between him and the Oxford college concerned. It would be difficult for me to take up some of the specifics to which she referred, not just because there is to be a court hearing but because of a wider issue, namely the autonomy of our universities. That autonomy was most recently embodied in legislation passed by the last Government, which made clear that it was not for Parliament—or Government—to instruct universities on their admission policies. It is therefore hard for me to discuss the specific case of this individual and this university.

I do, however, completely understand the wider issues raised by the right hon. Lady. Let me begin by making it clear that postgraduate education is becoming far more important. There is an increasing range of jobs for which a postgraduate qualification is expected, and Alan Milburn was right to describe that as a growing challenge in the area of social mobility and the spreading of opportunity.

I began my career as a civil servant, entering the Treasury as a former undergraduate with a single degree, but most people who join the Treasury now probably have a postgraduate qualification. I am not sure that it has made the conduct of economic policy any better, but that is beside the point. The qualification levels among people entering those jobs and, indeed, many of the professions has changed in a generation, and that is the background to the wider debate about postgraduate qualifications.

I have followed the arguments about these matters very closely. In fact, in the past two and a half years we have hardly changed Government funding for postgraduate study. Notwithstanding all the controversy about our changes to undergraduate finance and despite the wider need for public expenditure control, we have been able—along with the Higher Education Funding Council—to sustain, broadly, past levels of funding for postgraduate education. HEFCE’s allocation for taught postgraduate provision is being maintained at about £135 million and it will provide about £235 million for postgraduate research degree supervision support, while the research councils will spend about £340 million on postgraduate research provision.

I occasionally read about reductions in support for postgraduate provision. In tough times we have been able to maintain that support, but because postgraduate qualifications are becoming increasingly important, the salience and significance of the debate about access to them becomes ever greater. That is why the right hon. Lady has raised the issue this evening, and, as I have said, I accept her point—and Alan Milburn’s point—that we must not erect a new barrier to the spread of opportunity.

[Hazel Blears]

I understand the limitations on what the Minister can say about the individual case, but is he at all concerned that 47% of people who apply to Oxford are unable to take up their places, despite having the academic qualifications, simply because they cannot raise the money up front?

[Mr Willetts]

I would be concerned if any people who had the ability to benefit from education at any level were not able to take that opportunity. I have just heard the figure that the right hon. Lady cites, having not previously been aware of it. Successive Governments have not been able to extend a general financial support to postgraduate students. I do not want to get into discussing cases of individual universities, but Oxford university argues that it understands the need for more scholarship support so that people are not debarred from postgraduate study at Oxford by financial pressures. My understanding is that in only the most recent few months it has raised £30 million in extra support. I heard, as I am sure hat the administration governing bodies at Oxford will have done, the right hon. Lady’s points about the case for scholarships linked to need and financial circumstances. However, successive Governments have so far not been able to offer a general Exchequer support for postgraduate students. No Government have even been able to offer a means-tested maintenance grant for these students. It is very hard for any Government to go straight into that.

Let me take the right hon. Lady through some of the wider arguments. First, like her, I have read the report by the Higher Education Commission—I have read several recent reports. I do not think I am breaking any confidence by saying that I recall being shadow Secretary of State, discussing this issue with the then Secretary of State, Lord Mandelson, as he now is, and urging that the terms of reference for the Browne review be drawn so broadly as to include postgraduate provision—I remember proposing that to him. The terms of reference for Browne would have made it possible for Browne to make proposals for postgraduate provision, but Browne rather ducked the issue. He focused on these very old proposals on undergraduate provision, and all he said on postgraduates was that the situation needed to be monitored. We of course came into government and received the conclusions from the report, which the previous Government had commissioned. By and large—not perfectly—we acted on those provisions, including by asking Adrian Smith, who was then a senior official in the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills and is now at HEFCE, to monitor what is happening to postgraduate education. This matter was covered by the terms of reference for the inquiry that Labour set up and we have complied with the proposals from that report on monitoring the situation, but Browne was not able to crack the wider problem.

[Hazel Blears]

One of the rewards for winning a general election is that people move from opposition into government, so the Minister is now perfectly well placed to put into action the plans he had when he was in opposition. Will he grasp that opportunity and do so?

[Mr Willetts]

And of course one of the rewards of going from government into opposition is that people can call for proposals that they were never able to afford or deliver while they were in government, so it works both ways.

I am open-minded on this issue. I accept that there are genuine concerns about social mobility, as expressed by Alan Milburn and others. I can see postgraduate qualifications becoming increasingly important. I am following with great interest the debate that has been launched with several different reports—the Higher Education Commission report is one but I want to touch on several others, too—on how our financing system could be changed to assist people into postgraduate provision.

[Mr Willetts]

I agree with the right hon. Gentleman, who has experience of this area in government, about the importance of the global issue. I appreciate that both right hon. Members have rightly focused on the wider social mobility issue and neither has tried to claim that the changes to undergraduate finance are the problem. Of course, the monthly and annual repayments of student loans for undergraduates will fall under our new arrangements, so that is not the issue. Regardless of what is happening in undergraduate education, the debate is much more about social mobility and the changing economic scene.

I welcome the interventions from several groups of experts. We have had the Higher Education Commission report that has been mentioned and an ingenious proposal from Tim Leunig of the CentreForum. Even the NUS, which in other contexts is against the loan and repayment scheme, has called for a postgraduate loan scheme, which is what I think the right hon. Lady was calling for. There are risks as well as attractions in that approach, and the biggest single risk is that as soon as we had a general public expenditure programme or loans scheme, the Treasury would immediately become interested in how many people were eligible, controlling postgraduate numbers and setting new conditions. It would be a great pity if this open and diverse sector found itself with a highly regulated loan scheme that constrained its growth.

I do not accept and have not been persuaded at this stage that a Government-funded loan scheme is the answer, but I am happy to consider that proposal and others if people make them.

[Hazel Blears]

The Minister has said that he values the openness and diversity of the postgraduate sector. How diverse can it be when the requirement is to have £21,000 cash immediately available to pay up front? Is that not an issue that narrows the sector through selection by wealth rather than academic merit?

[Mr Willetts]

I fully understand that we cannot afford the sheer waste of talent if people who can benefit from any level of education do not participate. As well as the fairness argument, there is an efficiency argument and when fairness and efficiency point the same way, it leads to a clear recognition on both sides of the House of what must be done.

We have now had the opportunity offered by the Browne report, which led simply to a proposal on monitoring, which HEFCE is doing. We have also had several interesting proposals from outside bodies. Only this afternoon, I spent two hours at HEFCE at a seminar on postgraduate finance that it organised to go through the possible options. Of course, I realise that some of the proposals are for loan schemes and there are other ideas, too. I want more career development loans to be taken up and I follow the figures with great interest, as I am keen to see whether there are barriers to people taking up such loans. I am not commenting on the specific case that was mentioned, and I do not know whether that option was investigated, but it is an important way of getting support and I welcome it.

I am also very interested in whether universities, by fundraising and using links to alumni, can find ways of delivering needs-blind admissions to their postgraduate courses. This is a very good moment for the right hon. Lady to have called this debate as there are a range of ideas out there. All I can undertake is that I will carry on considering them. If anything looks to me to be well targeted and affordable at a time when public money is tight, I undertake to consider it very sympathetically. As yet, no idea has been proposed that meets all those criteria and we must be wary of extending the hand of Treasury control to postgraduate education, a sector that has hitherto not experienced that.

The only other point I want to make in the limited time that is left is to stress that we will explore proposals made in the studies involving employers, universities and banks. We are keen to have those conversations and I am absolutely—

Social Mobility

Debate between Hazel Blears and Lord Willetts

Thursday 28th June 2012 Westminster Hall

[The Minister for Universities and Science (Mr David Willetts)]

Thank you, Mr Rosindell, for chairing the debate; I also thank Mr Hollobone, who was in the Chair before you. I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for East Hampshire (Damian Hinds) and the right hon. Member for Salford and Eccles (Hazel Blears) on doing an excellent job in bringing together the all-party group on social mobility.

My hon. Friend’s opening speech was excellent and included some great truths. It is true, for example, that everyone in the education system blames people in the stage behind for the problems that they face. I completely recognise that observation. He was also right to challenge some issues relating to social mobility, as was the right hon. Lady.

Perhaps the most interesting thing about this debate has been not so much the front-of-house stuff, but the back story—the personal accounts that we have heard from several Members of their own experiences. I will not share my complete personal back story, but I will say that a lot of my family also came from Small Heath in Birmingham, and one of these days I will compare notes with the hon. Member for Birmingham, Ladywood (Shabana Mahmood) on Birmingham and the trades in which my family worked.

I want to pick up on some of the important points raised by my hon. Friend the Member for East Hampshire, which are captured in the excellent report, “Seven Key Truths about Social Mobility”, which combines the best features of a think-tank pamphlet and a McKinsey PowerPoint presentation. He lists seven truths and I recognise a lot of them, but I would challenge him on two points in his report. The first is the statement:

“The point of greatest leverage for social mobility is what happens between the ages of 0 and 3”.

I realise that that is very much the view nowadays, as a result of which we have a different pattern of spending in Britain from the OECD average, with more spent on early years and less on other stages of the education process. We must beware of becoming Calvinists who think that everything is determined by early-year experiences. The Government’s approach in our report on social mobility, “Opening Doors, Breaking Barriers”, is to look at each stage of the life cycle. My hon. Friend the Member for Cleethorpes (Martin Vickers) made an important point about going to university and graduating at the age of 54. It is a reminder that nobody’s fate is determined by their earlier experience.

People have the opportunity to break free and take the initiative. I meet exceptional examples of that. To take a classic case, a lone parent, perhaps aged about 30, who left school at 16 and has been busy raising kids, begins to think about what they will do with the rest of their lives just when their kids are at secondary school or even older. They suddenly think, “With my experience, I could be a social worker, join the police or become a nurse.” They want to go to college and university to get the qualification to enable them to do that. That is the kind of opportunity we need to continue to provide.

There is an interaction between the different stages of social mobility, in that often one of the best things that we can do for a child aged nought to three is provide further or higher education for their parent. The experience of the parent having an opportunity as a mature student is often an incredible investment in the child as well. To provide higher-quality early-year experiences, it is important that we have better qualified staff in child care, which in turn requires further investment in apprenticeships and college and university courses. The more I look at it, the more I am persuaded of the interaction between experiences at different stages, rather than a special priority for one stage.

I agree with the vast majority of the report, but I am trying to identify some areas of challenge. I agree that university is the top determinant of later opportunities, so pre-18 attainment is key. It gives people an important opportunity. The debate in Britain about what follows is sometimes rather fraught. There are two extremes. In the Chinese model, everybody sits an exam at 18, and those with the top 100 marks go to the university of Beijing, the next 100 go to Shanghai, the next 100 go somewhere else and everything is ranked by the marks.

The other extreme is the American model, where Harvard or Princeton mould the class. Ivy league universities have a view about the mix of people they want. They look for people who play sport and those who do not. They think about ethnic mix, alumnae and donors. There is a host of criteria. Someone must have reached a certain academic level, of course, but the institutions are explicit: they are moulding the class because they think that doing so moulds the future of America. It helps to shape the people who will govern and have leadership roles in America.

In Britain, we are somewhere in between. I am a complete meritocrat on this issue, but I do not think that a university in Britain has ever simply used the marks at A-level as the only criterion; they also try to assess who has the greatest ability to benefit from going to university. One encouraging thing about university is that, if anything, it is the first stage of the education process where people from more disadvantaged backgrounds outperform, rather than underperform. That is something that universities take into account when they look at how to maximise people’s chances of getting a good degree—a first or a 2:1.

My hon. Friend the Member for East Hampshire made an excellent speech. He made a series of shrewd observations, which we will draw on as we develop our social mobility strategy. The right hon. Member for Salford and Eccles also made an excellent speech, with a shocking example of social attitudes: the solicitor who nearly offered her a job, but did not. I hope I am not complacent, but I think—and hope—that that view of the world has long since gone. In my experience, including chairing the group on access to the professions, the legal, medical and accountancy professions are desperate to reach out to the range of talent across the country, regardless of background.

The right hon. Lady asked three specific questions, which I will briefly respond to. She talked about what was happening to widen the networks of people from the poorest backgrounds. There are limits to what Governments can do, but we will launch the new Inspiring the Future programme next month, following the success of Speakers for Schools. It aims to get into schools, especially in the more deprived areas; people from a range of careers and jobs will open kids’ eyes to what the possibilities are. We already have 800 volunteers—people who have achieved something, who know about a job and who can explain it persuasively.

On internships and unpaid internships, and going back to the right hon. Lady’s pressure for networks, internships have become an important part of routes into work. Therefore, we have kept the Graduate Talent Pool, which began under the previous Labour Government; I have confirmed this week that we are keeping it for three years. It is a web-based service with information on internships for people who might not otherwise be part of a network that provides them with such information.

Since its launch, the site has carried 47,000 vacancies from 6,000 employers, and 73,000 graduates have registered. Due to concerns about the exploitation of interns, we have made it clear in a recent update of the site that we have added a quality assurance process for any new vacancy, to ensure that it offers a graduate-level internship opportunity and complies with minimum wage regulations.

More widely, I assure the right hon. Lady that we are clear about minimum wage obligations. If something is employment, with the obligations that come with employment, such as set hours when people are expected to attend the workplace, the minimum wage applies. The Government are conducting a targeted enforcement operation in sectors where internships are commonplace and where we are aware of advertisements for unpaid work experience.

The right hon. Lady’s third and final question was about great employers.

[Hazel Blears]

Before the Minister leaves the subject of internships, I should say that I asked about the current anomalous situation whereby it is still lawful to advertise unpaid internships that are clearly jobs with set hours. That seems to be a contradiction in terms: if it is unlawful to have the job unless it is paid the minimum wage, I cannot for the life of me understand why advertising such placements, which on the face of it contravene national minimum wage legislation, is permitted. Will he look at the issue of advertising for such posts?

[Mr Willetts]

I will look at the issue but, because of our commitment to freedom of speech in this country, the regulation of what we can say or advertise is rather different from the regulation of the minimum wage, for instance. We have a higher and more demanding criterion before we say, “This form of communication is banned.” When we are aware of advertisements for unpaid work experience, and when it looks as if a sector has become particularly active with those, we engage in targeted enforcement through Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs.

On businesses, I refer briefly to the social mobility business compact that we have introduced. Some 140 businesses have signed up already, involving 2.5 million employees. That is absolutely to do with businesses committing themselves to drawing on the widest range of talents.

Let me refer to some of the other lively contributions to the debate, including from my hon. Friend the Member for Thurrock (Jackie Doyle-Price) on apprenticeships, which were also brought up by my hon. Friend the Member for Edinburgh West (Mike Crockart). We are absolutely clear that higher education should not be seen as the only route into a well paid job. It is important that the classic, vocational route is available.

Indeed, one of the things that I am doing in the working group on access to the professions is to see whether we can reopen some of those non-graduate routes into accountancy or law that used to exist and were perfectly legitimate in the past. Nowadays, they might involve employers at some point down the track sponsoring one of their employees through university as a mature student, to get some extra qualifications in finance or law—mature students who have already done some practical work as an employee might get even more out of the university course.

We are doing our best, working with the professions that will ultimately decide, to ensure that those routes are opened up again. My hon. Friend the Member for Thurrock rightly referred to the work of my excellent colleague, the Minister for Further Education, Skills and Lifelong Learning. The Government’s record in expanding apprenticeships is evidence that we really are committed to them. We are way ahead of our target, having added more than 200,000 apprenticeships since the coalition took office.

I am not sure whether I should stray into the remarks on grammar schools made by my hon. Friends the Member for Rugby (Mark Pawsey) and for Thurrock, but I will just very briefly observe that what worked in the past as a device for social mobility does not necessarily work today. In Birmingham, I did sit the 11-plus, in the days when all of us, at every local primary school, sat in our rows of desks and did the exam. Nowadays, there is more tuition for the 11-plus, and more people who go to private schools up to the age of 11 to get themselves taught to pass the exam.

Although we respect the decision in parts of the country to keep grammar schools, the evidence is that the number of children from low-income backgrounds who pass the 11-plus in those areas and go to grammar schools has, sadly, declined. It might be that the schools do not work in the way they used to—as an opportunity—and that is one reason why the Government do not propose a return to selective education. Within schools, streaming and setting are, of course, very effective devices.

This has been a wide-ranging debate, and I have tried not to focus solely on higher education, but I absolutely agree with the points about mature students, and it was great to have at least one such student identify himself. We should not think of higher education as something that people do just at the age of 18.

When we consider the evidence from UCAS applications, we look particularly carefully at what has been happening with mature students. There was a bit of a surge in their numbers two or three years ago, and it is a bit early to say whether there is an underlying pattern, but, as I said in my intervention on my hon. Friend the Member for Edinburgh West, despite the fears that people had about our fee proposals, the evidence so far from applications is encouraging.

My party—the Conservative Opposition, as it then was—was afraid that people would be put off applying when the then Labour Government introduced the £3,000 fees in 2005, and that is one reason why we voted against the measures. The evidence, however, was that the £3,000 fees did not have the feared effect, and that gave us some confidence that with a fees and loan system, in which no student had to pay up front, we could avoid such fears. The number of 18-year-olds is falling, due to a decline in the birth rate in the early ’90s. Allowing for the slight fall in the size of that cohort, the number of university applications from school leavers is down by about 2%, but the fall among school leavers from the poorest backgrounds is, if anything, rather less. We take some encouragement from that.

Finally, I say to my hon. Friend the Member for East Hampshire that the debate has been valuable. I am sorry that it has not been possible to cover all the excellent comments, but we will certainly draw on them as we develop the Government’s social mobility strategy.