Higher Education and Research Bill

Jim Cunningham Excerpts

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

[Justine Greening]

I am sure my right hon. Friend is right.

[Mr Jim Cunningham (Coventry South) (Lab)]

rose—

[Justine Greening]

I will make a bit more progress, because I recognise that many hon. Members want to contribute to this debate. I will give way in a second, but it is important that I briefly set out for the House how the OfS will be able to act when students and taxpayers are not well served. When there are grounds to suspect a serious breach of a provider’s conditions of registration or funding, the office for students will have the power to enter and search a higher education provider, subject to the crucial safeguard that a court warrant must be obtained first.

[Mr Cunningham]

rose—

[Justine Greening]

I will give way to the hon. Gentleman because he has been trying to catch my eye, but I must then try to make some progress on this long Bill.

[Mr Cunningham]

I have two universities in my constituency. What did the Secretary of State mean when she said that other institutions can share in these changes? I was not clear what she meant.

[Justine Greening]

I was talking about the changes to degree-awarding powers. For institutions that may currently feel they cannot go down this route because it is simply too complex and long-winded, we will open up the sector to enable great institutions to step up to become, over time, an institution that awards degrees directly and then for excellent institutions to become, after a further three years, a university. This is important for Britain. If we are to be a country in which our young people have the number of places they want at high-quality institutions, with the range of different degrees that they want and that our economy needs, it is important to have a higher education sector that can respond and that is what the Bill seeks to address.

The Bill enables the OfS to require registered higher education providers to have a student protection plan in place. Students will want to know what to expect from their providers if their course of study cannot be delivered. Although some providers currently have student protection plans, the new requirement means that students of all registered providers will be protected.

This Government believe that no one with the necessary ability should be denied a place at university. That is why, for the first time ever, we are providing direct financial support for those undertaking postgraduate masters study. We also intend to extend direct financial support to postgraduate doctoral study and to introduce part-time maintenance loans comparable to those we give to full-time students.

The Bill will make significant improvements to higher education and research, but let me reassure the House that none of these changes will be delivered by undermining other routes into highly skilled employment. We are committed to creating 3 million apprenticeships by 2020, and the Government recently launched the skills plan, which is our response to Lord Sainsbury’s independent review of technical education, setting out an ambitious overhaul of the post-16 skills system. Taken as a whole, those changes will allow young people to make well-informed decisions about their futures, giving them every opportunity to achieve their potential and, at the same time, improving the quality, relevance and value of learning.

I have talked a lot today about teaching and students, but the UK is also a world leader in research and innovation. Established and emerging economies alike look on in envy not just at the quality and breadth of our research, but at our incredible track record of turning innovative ideas into life-changing, marketable products and services. The Government are protecting science resource funding at its current level of £4.7 billion, which will rise in cash terms every year for the rest of the Parliament. At the same time, we are investing in new scientific infrastructure on a record scale, delivering on the £6.9 billion science capital commitment in our manifesto.

Few people understand the research landscape better than the Nobel prize-winning geneticist Sir Paul Nurse. Aside from being an inspirational example of how social mobility can happen in our country, last year he completed an independent review of our seven research councils, recommending that the seven existing bodies be brought together into a single body. The Bill will make his recommendation of

“a formal organisation…which can support the whole system to collectively become more than the sum of its parts”

a reality.

--- Later in debate ---

[Mr Carmichael]

I do think it important to attract people to the NHS. I think that today we should be concentrating on the Bill as it stands, but our Committee will certainly consider that issue in due course.

Let me return to my point about social justice and the need to extend it to all, because that is critical. In particular, we need to extend it throughout the country, to regions, areas and localities that have, in effect, been surrounded by a wall: a wall against hope, a wall against opportunity, a wall against achievement.

That leads me to my second key point. The Bill is also about productivity, because that is a critical issue as well. A society in which people can feel included, feel able to express themselves, and feel able to get the jobs and opportunities that they want must be a society that is also based on an economic, productive model. Productivity equals more opportunity, because it means people having more skills, being able to command a higher salary, and being able to do things that they could not otherwise do—so the productivity argument is at the core of why we have to improve our university sector in the way this Bill seeks.

[Mr Jim Cunningham]

Does the hon. Gentleman acknowledge that productivity is also linked to research and development, in particular R and D projects with Europe? There is a concern. The vice-chancellor of Warwick University thinks that withdrawal from Europe might have an impact on some of the projects it gets finance for. Will the hon. Gentleman’s Committee look at that, or has it already looked at that consequence?

[Neil Carmichael]

I thank the hon. Gentleman for his intervention. It is essential that we have R and D, and if we look at the comparators between ourselves and other countries that we are competing with we find some areas where we could and should be doing better—so the hon. Gentleman is absolutely right.

I want to make a point about productivity. The important point about the German economy, which according to the OECD is 28% more productive than ours, is that businesses, companies and professions understand that human resources—people—are the things that really matter. I shall give an example to show how I know that. I once went to a car factory in Lower Saxony, east Germany. It had been built from the ashes of the collapse of the communist regime, and it was producing Porsche cars. I asked the factory manager what the supply chain looked like, and he said, “I can show you”. He showed me the typical things from Bosch and Pirelli and all the rest, but colleges and universities—people—were also part of the supply chain. That is a very important point, because it shows that if we are really going to be productive and drive through the growth we need, we must consider the human resources. In making sure that we do so, this Bill is a huge step in the right direction.

--- Later in debate ---

[Carol Monaghan]

I agree 100% with my hon. Friend. Diversity in our institutions and what we learn from overseas students enrich the experience for all students in higher education.

International students who are considering a move to a UK university could view an English university with a strong TEF rating as offering a better experience than a Scottish university with no TEF rating. Since the TEF will be grounded in quality assurance scores, and given that Scotland has a distinct quality assurance system, recognition of Scotland’s enhancement-led institutional reviews, and benchmarking those reviews against TEF ratings, would allow institutions in Scotland to continue to compete on a level playing field when attracting international students.

It is important to exercise caution around the use of metrics to judge quality of teaching. Certain metrics—graduate salary or student satisfaction, for example—can drive university behaviour in a negative way, as higher education institutions are incentivised to sacrifice certain subjects in favour of areas that produce more positive results in the criteria being measured. Courses that are more challenging and perhaps score lower in student satisfaction metrics—for example, vital STEM courses—could end up being dropped because they do not measure well on the TEF metrics. If metrics are to be used, it is important for our economy that they are carefully honed to ensure that the degrees being taken and the skills developed still meet the overall needs of society.

We should view with caution the drive towards marketisation of the student experience. Giving the power to award degrees to new untested providers on day one is a concern if there is no clear mechanism to ensure that those providers have a track record of delivering quality courses to students. Plans that assist the entry of “for profit” providers and award them with the title of “university” will be damaging as the UK competes internationally for students. Perhaps most importantly, those new institutions, which often have no record, will compete for significant numbers of students while allowing them to cherry-pick profitable courses.

[Mr Jim Cunningham]

I am sure the hon. Lady knows that the National Union of Students is concerned about what we call the creeping privatisation of the university service. We could end up with a situation like the mess we have in the national health service through privatisation by the back door.

[Carol Monaghan]

All SNP Members share that concern, and we should be worried about the move towards privatisation of the university system.

Courses that are more expensive to deliver—again, I mention STEM courses—will be left to traditional higher education institutions that will either bear that financial burden alone or, worse still, will abandon some of the courses that have earned the UK its worldwide reputation for excellence in that field. New institutions will be allowed to operate without providing services such as libraries or student unions, which are a key part of the student experience at university. Indeed, the Bill permits competition not on equal terms with existing universities, but on substantially reduced terms. The only assumption one can make is that the new providers will put profit before students.

The Government have outlined two models, and with the “low” fee cap of £6,000 we will have universities that potentially offer lower quality provision. At the other end of the scale, the higher fee of £9,000 can further rise with inflation. Where teaching is high quality, that is recognised as a strength of an individual course, not of an institution, yet fees will be the same for all courses in an institution. Creating a system that assesses the quality of a whole institution and allows it to raise the fees for every course based on that assessment when the quality of teaching will vary across departments, is unrealistic. It will create a framework in which students could study courses of lower quality at an institution that was judged to provide “generally” high quality, yet they would, unfairly, be charged higher fees for poor-quality degrees.