Draft Higher Education (Access and Participation Plans) (England) Regulations 2018

Debate between John Grogan and Sam Gyimah

Thursday 11th January 2018 General Committees

[The Minister for Higher Education (Mr Sam Gyimah)]

I beg to move,

That the Committee has considered the draft Higher Education (Access and Participation Plans) (England) Regulations 2018.

Mr Davies, may I say what a pleasure it is to serve under your chairmanship? As this is my first outing in this job, I would like to take the opportunity to put on record that my predecessor, my hon. Friend the Member for Orpington (Joseph Johnson), did a fantastic job, and I look forward to building on his work.

Widening access to higher education is a priority for this Government. Our reforms are ensuring that anyone with the talent and potential to benefit from higher education is able to do so. We have made good progress. The latest UCAS data show that in 2017, disadvantaged 18-year-olds were 50% more likely to enter full-time higher education than in 2009. There is a record high entry rate of 20.4%. In addition, 18-year-olds were more likely to enter full-time higher education than ever before.

However, we are not complacent, and there is more to do. That is why we introduced measures through the Higher Education and Research Act 2017 to make further progress on access and participation. They are designed to enable more people from all backgrounds to access higher education and to support their success. The measures are a vital part of our ambition to increase social mobility.

As of 1 January, we have established the Office for Students as the new regulator for higher education. It brings together the previous responsibilities of the director of fair access and the Higher Education Funding Council for England, to enable a more strategic focus on access and participation activities. It will, for example, allow greater co-ordination of Government funding for wider participation with the money that providers spend through their access and participation plans, which should ensure a greater impact on the ground. As Sir Michael Barber, the OFS chair, has indicated, the OFS will ensure that the sector meets rising expectations for student access and aims to transform expectations of what is possible.

The legislation places responsibility for access and participation on the OFS. That is a key part of its remit. We expect the new director for fair access and participation—a position in the OFS explicitly defined in legislation—to be responsible for overseeing the OFS’s functions on access and participation. They will be appointed by the Secretary of State and will report on access and participation performance to the other members of the OFS board.

Access and participation plans will continue to be a key mechanism for ensuring that students from disadvantaged backgrounds and under-represented groups can access and succeed in higher education. In future, any provider that is subject to a fee cap and wishes to charge tuition fees above the basic amount must, in line with current practice, have an access and participation plan approved by the OFS. Providers are expected to spend a proportion of the higher level fees on activities to support students from disadvantaged and under-represented groups to access and succeed in higher education.

Those plans will help to ensure that providers are doing all they can to widen access, to support the participation of students from disadvantaged and under-represented groups throughout their courses and to tackle drop-out rates. They will also support attainment of qualifications and progression into highly skilled jobs. That support across the student lifecycle is important as access is meaningful only if entrants go on to complete their courses and achieve good outcomes.

It is more than 10 years since access agreements were introduced. They have supported and encouraged numerous improvements in fair access and widening participation. In 2018-19, universities and further education colleges plan to spend through their plans more than £860 million on activities to support students from disadvantaged backgrounds and under-represented groups to access, succeed in and progress from higher education. Access and participation plans are designed to be a further improvement, by challenging providers to do more to help students from disadvantaged and under-represented groups to enter higher education, complete their course and progress successfully into skilled work.

Why are the draft regulations important? They will be vital to ensuring that a full legal framework is in place to enable the OFS to improve access and participation plans prepared by providers. They will not represent a major change from the current arrangements for implementing access agreements approved by the director of fair access, but will largely continue the existing way of working—with the exception that plans will now be required to consider participation, success and preparedness for progression from higher education, as well as access.

The draft regulations will provide detail to support sections 29 to 34 of the 2017 Act, which relate to the contents and arrangements for approving and varying access and participation plans. They do not cover monitoring or enforcement arrangements, but the OFS will be able to monitor ongoing compliance and has certain enforcement powers in situations where providers breach registration conditions.

The draft regulations will provide a framework for the process by which the OFS, through its director for fair access and participation, may approve access and participation plans with providers. They will also provide a system for review of approval decisions, such as in cases in which the OFS is minded not to approve a plan. The arrangements for the approval of access agreements are essentially those that have been in place—and been set out in regulations—since 2004. They have worked well, and our intention is to keep the process largely as it is.

One important improvement is the requirement for the OFS to take account of whether a provider has given its students an opportunity to comment and whether it has considered their views when developing its plan. This change was included in response to comments made in the House during the passage of the 2017 Act about the importance of ensuring students’ views are taken into account across our higher education reforms.

A separate impact assessment for the draft regulations has not been prepared, because a more general assessment was prepared for the 2017 Act’s introduction and has recently been updated following its enactment. In our view, moving from access agreements to access and participation plans should impose no additional cost on providers that charge at the higher fee limit.

Importantly, the arrangements for access and participation plans outlined in the draft regulations take account of institutional autonomy. The 2017 Act confers on the OFS a duty to protect academic freedom, including the freedom of providers to determine their own admissions requirements, when it performs its functions relating to access and participation plans.

[John Grogan (Keighley) (Lab)]

I am listening carefully to the Minister’s argument. Before he concludes, will he say a few words about how the new arrangements might help mature and part-time students, who often come from disadvantaged backgrounds and whose numbers have plummeted in recent years, to the concern of all of us?

[Mr Gyimah]

As part of fair access, that is an issue that the OFS as a new regulator can look at. In some cases, there are broader issues affecting access to higher education that need to be considered separately, but for access agreements the OFS can look at the matter as well.

The draft regulations provide important detail that will allow providers to develop their access and participation plans in line with Government priorities. They will ensure that the OFS can approve plans in a fair and transparent fashion. I commend them to the Committee.