Higher Education and Research Bill (First sitting)

Debate between Jo Churchill and Paul Blomfield

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

[Jo Churchill (Bury St Edmunds) (Con)]

Q Moving to a slightly different area, do you think the reforms in the Bill will help to drive social mobility and widen participation? I am particularly interested in capturing the more mature people in our workforce to ensure skills are kept up throughout a working life.

Professor Quintin McKellar: We would specifically hope that the Bill might include not only elements that drive competition but those that drive collaboration, because we think that collaborative activity can help us with our widening participation. To give one example, black and minority ethnic students have currently got an attainment disadvantage across the sector and we are working together collaboratively across the sector to try to address that. Without that sort of collaboration—if we were simply competing with each other—it is very difficult. Collaboration is hugely important, particularly in regard to social mobility.

Mary Curnock Cook: While the arrangements for making data from UCAS, for example, available to researchers will not change social mobility in itself, it does open up the opportunity to look specifically at different aspects of social mobility.

Professor Sir Leszek Borysiewicz: One potential advantage that we must recognise of the move of some of the education and OFS to the Department for Education is that it may well begin to address the continuum of education and the attainment shortfalls that largely reside within the secondary schools. If that promotes greater interaction between the requirements for entry into higher education and a greater understanding of that within secondary education and more cohesion at that level, that could be a real help towards closing the attainment gap of BME students.

[Paul Blomfield]

Q May I pursue the issue of the regulatory framework a little further? Obviously, this is the first major discussion we have had on this for some time and it is important that we get it right. It is in the context of a Bill that is also seeking to encourage new providers. What thoughts do members of the panel have on how we should get it right and whether there are any ways in which the Bill could be improved in relation to the entry point of the new providers, the overall oversight of the system and the potential for market failure?

Professor Sir Leszek Borysiewicz: This is a difficult issue. I think the provision of diversity in the sector is something that has stood British higher education well. Different institutions have different goals and directions and cater for different needs for higher education within the sector, from mature students at one end, to vocational courses, to those operating in a very academic sphere.

New providers have to be looked at in the context of what is the positive contribution they can make. Two important issues will be the demand from the sector for this new provision and, secondly, the standards under which those institutions are recognised. From my point of view there is a third which is very important: high standards have to be set for the sustainability of new providers in the sector. It is no good an operation starting with an income stream that is predicated on a business plan of recruitment without a sufficient resource to ensure that those entering in year one will be able to complete their studies and end up with a degree that is actually worth something when facing employers. Otherwise, this is something that becomes not helpful and potentially very detrimental to the achievement and attainment of those individual students. That is the one area on which I would like to see rather more stress paid; the sustainability of the provision by a new provider.

Professor Quintin McKellar: We would support the diversity and competition that new providers would bring to the sector. The concern we have is one that has been raised already: that they cherry-pick subjects. In terms of continuing to provide across the board STEM subjects of engineering, mathematics and so on, it is unlikely that the new providers will enter those areas, and that could be a risk for the rest of us.

Sir Alan Langlands: I think the Bill does try to strike the balance between rigour in relation to new entries and streamlining the system a bit. We have to be careful that we are not driven too much in the direction of streamlining without the rigour. The rigour has to be on quality and standards, access and participation, good governance. Linking to Professor Borysiewicz’s point, it is hugely important that financial sustainability is seen alongside academic sustainability. This has got to be a long-term effort, if you are developing a new universe.

Mary Curnock Cook: Briefly, I would like to echo the points about sustainability, because I think it is absolutely catastrophic for students if their provider is forced to exit the market. A lot of higher education is very local. A lot of students go to university within a few miles of where they live, and there are not necessarily other providers where they could continue their studies if their institution fails.

The only other point I would make is about university title. I do not want to start a debate about “What is a university?”, but I think that most people, their parents, advisers, teachers and everyone else involved has a clear idea about what they think a university is. It would be of concern if students were applying to something that they thought was a university in the general understanding of the issue and found that it was something quite different.

Higher Education and Research Bill

Debate between Jo Churchill and Paul Blomfield

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

[Paul Blomfield]

I will continue to be nice, because I recognise the thought and effort that the Minister has put into developing the Bill. I commend him for the way in which he has listened to those across the sector and other stakeholders in shifting thinking, as discourse has moved forward. There is a lot more listening to do, because there are still a number of reservations.

The Bill raises some very important issues: on teaching quality, clearly; on widening participation; on reopening the debate on credit accumulation and transfer; and on several other areas. Sadly, however, as other hon. Members have highlighted, those are not necessarily the key challenges for the sector right now. The Secretary of State was right to say in her opening remarks that our university system punches above its weight. Our universities are hugely important in the transformational impact they have on those who study in them, in building the skills base of our country and in contributing over £11 billion to our export earnings, and this hugely successful sector of course contributes through research and innovation to the wider development of our economy. We have one of the world’s best university systems, but universities face real challenges, many of which, frankly, are not covered by the Bill.

Let me turn back to Brexit. The hon. Member for Bury St Edmunds said that we should look at the opportunities of Brexit. Whether we describe them as opportunities or as challenges, there are real issues to face. She highlighted the fact that we are in the top 10 for research. One reason for that is the enormous funding we have had through FP7—Horizon 2020, as it is now—from the European Union. The EU is spending about £70 billion through Horizon 2020, and until 23 June more was allocated to British-led partnerships than to any other member state. Without that, our research capacity will be deeply affected, with huge economic consequences.

The Minister will recall that I asked him, just days after the Brexit vote, what action he was taking to protect that funding. Reassuringly, he said that we should not worry about anything for the next couple of years because we would still be in the European Union and fully accessing Horizon 2020. That was not an unreasonable answer at that moment—I would have probably given the same one—but when I talked to the vice-chancellors of my two universities in Sheffield two days later, they both reported that locally led research teams had been asked to pull out of trans-European projects bidding for Horizon 2020, because a UK research teams would be a drag on securing funding, given all the associated uncertainty. Mike Galsworthy, who is the director of Scientists for EU, has been trying to monitor the impact on research. He reports that already—just a couple of weeks on—of the 378 responses he has received from research teams, over a quarter are reporting difficulties because everyone fears the risk of having a team from non-EU Britain as a partner.

The Government therefore need, and I hope that the Minister will address this when he winds up, to consider urgently—more urgently than many of the other issues covered by the Bill—what he intends to do to offset the impact we are already seeing. He should commit to underwriting all Horizon 2020 funding to give research teams the reassurance that they can go forward confidently without letting down their partners. He should also talk to those quite close to him—[Interruption] I was thinking of a different form of relationship, but that one will do—about making an early commitment to putting Horizon 2020 at the top of the agenda in our negotiations on what post-Brexit Britain will look like.

The second issue is about recruiting and retaining talent. Between our two universities in Sheffield, there are 406 EU nationals on a salary of less than £35,000. That figure is important because it means that they would not meet the criteria for successful tier 2 visa applications. These are early-career academics—the talent of the future—who will be driving the research and the teaching quality of the future in our universities. Unless we can give them the confidence that they and their successors from European countries can come to this country to work, teach and research in our universities, we will be severely weakening our talent base.

Such issues are not addressed in the Bill, but it threatens to do more damage in the third area of concern in universities, which is international students—an issue on which the Minister and I agree, and about which many Government Members have made the same point. As the right hon. Member for East Devon (Mr Swire) pointed out, the Home Office has done enormous damage to our ability to compete in the growing international marketplace to recruit international students. Brexit threatens greater damage in relation not just to the 185,000 EU students who are here, but to the 320,000 or so non-EU students. Hobsons, the major international student recruitment consultants, reported just a couple of weeks before the Brexit vote that about a third of non-EU nationals considering coming to the UK would find Britain a less attractive place to study if it exited the European Union, and one can understand why.

The Bill could make the situation worse by undermining the strength of the UK’s university brand through the teaching excellence framework. A one-level TEF might not have that consequence, because it would be a straightforward exercise that, subject to ticking certain boxes, most universities would glide through. However, the subsequent grading system creates a risk of brand damage, because we are developing it unilaterally. If we were measuring our universities equitably in parallel and in partnership with every country in the world, perhaps it would be different, but we are not. We are stepping outside what our competitors are doing and saying that we will spotlight our universities in a very different way. We will say that some are okay, some are outstanding and some are excellent. That will send out the message about those that do not reach the very top grade that international students ought to think twice about going there. I appreciate that that is not the Government’s intention, but it is a potential consequence that they need to consider closely. We already have a quality assurance system through the Quality Assurance Agency for Higher Education that is widely respected around the world.

If the Government are going down the TEF route, let us get it right. The thinking on this is significantly underdeveloped. I welcome the way in which, during the discussion about teaching quality, the Minister has moved away from an overdependence on quantitative metrics towards a more qualitative approach that involves institutions in the assessment process. However, there is still a focus on quantitative metrics that, as other Members have highlighted, are deeply flawed.

Employment destination is a key metric, but we all know that that is an unsatisfactory way of measuring teaching quality. Someone who comes from the right family, goes to the right school, goes to the right university and comes out with a passable degree will get a good job, because they have the contacts. [Interruption.] I did not catch the Minister’s observation, but I have no doubt he will make his point later. Employment destination might be a measure of the privilege someone was born into, but it is not a measure of teaching quality. We know that privately educated students are more likely to get a good degree than state educated students. We also know that graduate destination can be affected by the regional economy, so it is a very unsatisfactory metric.

In trying to widen participation, I admire the Government’s focus not simply on entry to university, but on success at university and beyond. However, using retention as a metric is potentially flawed, because the easiest way—I am not for a moment suggesting that any of our universities would do this—to get a good retention score is not to accept students who are likely to fail.

[Jo Churchill]

I agree with that point. A problem with the lack of flexibility in the system is that it does not allow those who have more disconnected lives to be iterative with a degree by going out and back in. That is a problem if Members across the House want to improve social mobility. Does the hon. Gentleman agree that we need to be more flexible to allow those whose lives do not conform to the three-year pattern to have access?