Further and Higher Education (Access) Bill
Debate between John Hayes and Jacob Rees-Mogg(14 years, 2 months ago)
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Jacob Rees-Mogg (North East Somerset) (Con)
I am an enormous admirer of my hon. Friend the Member for Christchurch (Mr Chope), who usually speaks the greatest sense in the House. I often find myself in agreement with him but, on this occasion, I am sorry to say that I do not.
Let me start at the beginning on access as it has been for many years. Let us think of a young man: the son of a butcher in a country during a time of civil war who goes to his local school, wins a scholarship to Oxford, goes to Magdalen college, gets to the top of his profession, and sets up his own college—now arguably the greatest Oxford college. That man was Cardinal Wolsey and the civil war was the wars of the roses. He went to Magdalen college in the 1480s and then set up Cardinal college, which was later turned into Christ Church by an envious and jealous King.
From the 15th century onwards, although I am sure that we could go back even further, it has been possible for people of great ability to get to our country’s highest and grandest universities, and to have the basis of education that allows them to go on to achieve great things. Cardinal Wolsey could have become Archbishop of Canterbury or Pope, but other than that, he had every great job that was open to him. He was the King’s First Minister, the Lord High Chancellor, a cardinal and the Archbishop of York. We see throughout our history that there has been social mobility through education and that universities have been free in the way in which they admit people for most of that time.
As an aside, I mention the admissions process of my own college—Trinity college, Oxford. It kindly admitted me, although it knows better than I do whether that was on merit or for any other reason. In the 18th century, Trinity managed to admit our greatest Prime Minister and our worst. It admitted Pitt the Elder, who founded a great empire and won all those wars—mainly against the French, actually—in Canada and India, and it later admitted Lord North, so admissions policies do not necessarily work. We might wish that Lord North had not been admitted to Trinity and that we still had the American empire.
Mr Hayes
While my hon. Friend was describing universities in an earlier age, I was reminded of “The Concept of a University” by Kenneth Minogue, with which he might be familiar. The book states:
“the prestige of universities in the Middle Ages was enormous, and rested on an admiration for education.”
The book states that that admiration, in our present age of universal literacy, is difficult to recapture. It says that mediaeval men seem to have thought of universities in a way an impoverished craftsman regards a brilliant child for whose education he is making sacrifices.
Jacob Rees-Mogg
The Minister makes an absolutely brilliant point. The prestige of universities ought to be great. In fact, it should be very difficult to get into the best universities because they provide such opportunities and a career path for the ablest in our society.
Let me move on to more modern times and come to the great lady—perhaps the greatest peacetime leader of this country in the past 100 years or more—Margaret Thatcher. She was not the daughter of a butcher—unlike Cardinal Wolsey, the son of a butcher—but the daughter of a shopkeeper who was born and who lived over a shop. She got a scholarship to Oxford and transformed this country. It was not only in the 15th and 18th centuries that university admissions policies allowed great people to get to university, to be enormously successful and to transform their nation’s success as a result. That is a thoroughly good and worthwhile thing, and it was all done without the Bill promoted by my hon. Friend the Member for Christchurch.
Jacob Rees-Mogg
I thank my hon. Friend. Yorkshire is a big county. It is almost as good a county as Somerset, but Somerset is particularly favoured by God.
If we are considering the basis of merit alone, how do we define merit? The Bill defines it as
“academic ability, potential and aptitude”,
but that is desperately woolly. Ability can be measured, but do we think that all exams correctly measure a student’s further success? I knew, as I completed my physics O-level, that I knew no more physics than that and that that was the limit of my ability in physics. I actually got an A grade in my physics O-level, of which I am rather proud, but if I had gone on to do physics at A-level, I would have sunk like a stone. I am sure that that is true of people doing other examinations. They might apply to university, but the university has to determine whether he or she has taken the subject to the limit of their ability and whether they would therefore find that they could go no further.
Jacob Rees-Mogg
I absolutely accept what the Minister says in his helpful intervention. I know how tall I am, or was, in terms of physics. Just as many people shrink as they get older, I feel that as I get older I begin to shrink in my ability to do physics, and cannot remember much of it. Universities need to take in people who can go further, and do better than the ability yet measured. To consider the Minister’s comparison and talk about how high people grow, we do not necessarily know how high a 16-year-old will be at 18. One has to make a judgment on it, and that judgment becomes subjective—it has to be, by its very nature.
Is it not always dangerous to put legislative constraints on subjective judgments? How does one then take them through the courts? How do they become justiciable? It is simply replacing one person’s judgment with another’s, and we cannot tell who was right until after the fact. I therefore have my doubts about the early definition of merit. Potential is even more subjective. We may think that the person whose height we are considering will grow to be a giant; we may be wrong. We cannot guess the qualities that we are talking about from an interview or a series of examinations.
We can, however, get a broad feeling or understanding, and a tutor can understand whether a person is someone whom they can teach. That is obviously important, because some dons at Oxford—I tend to stick to Oxford because I know it, but I am not speaking to the exclusion of all other universities—want to be able to get on with the people whom they are to teach. If a person comes for an interview and the tutor dislikes them at first sight, they may find that teaching them for three years would be neither to the pupil’s nor the tutor’s benefit, because it will be a constant battle of wills, with hostility and difficulty, without the tutor being able to express their knowledge to the pupil, or the pupil being able to learn from the tutor. The question of potential is even more deeply subjective than that of ability, and aptitude is, in a sense, the same.
Jacob Rees-Mogg
We should always deal in the realms of reality, and not assume that people would be so barkingly eccentric as to run off down that route. Universities want to be places of great academic excellence, and they want to be able to have a system that admits people fairly and freely. We are sometimes too suspicious of people’s motives. I accept that the Bill applies to publicly funded universities, but most universities receive public funding of one kind or another, if only via their charitable status.
That helpfully moves me on to another point—the key point of money. Money is always relevant to our discussions, but it is one of the most dangerous things with which Governments have to deal. We give money to an independent institution—great universities—and say, “Now we’ve given you some money, we must decide how you spend it,” and then, “Now we’ve decided how you should spend it, we must take a little more control”—and it becomes more and more control, until independent bodies become agents of the state. The Bill continues that process. Instead of our saying that the money will now come from students, and universities will become more independent of the state, the Bill is an effort to claw back state control. We see in the charitable and university sectors that when Governments spend money, they always want their pound of flesh, and the pound of flesh is interfering in the day-to-day running of organisations, denying them their freedoms. In some cases, that does not really matter, but it is crucial that academic freedom, as a fundamental good, be maintained as an absolute priority.
Let me carry on dealing with the details of the Bill. I raised this matter in an intervention: I am very much against passing Bills that are slightly absurd—I apologise to my hon. Friend the Member for Christchurch for being so harsh as to use that term. To have a Bill that applies to England and Wales only, and also only to people domiciled in England, does not seem to work. Surely, the universities in England should admit on the same basis anyone who comes along. To say that they will admit English people on merit but that they can admit the Scots, Irish and Welsh and people from the Commonwealth or European Union not according to merit does not make any sense. If we are to pass laws of this kind, there must be the same principle of application and entry for everyone who is eligible to enter subject to public funding. One might say that it is a good idea to take some overseas students because they can pay a vast fee that will subsidise some of the rest of the university’s operations, although after the Gaddafi affair one might not think that quite such a clever idea, but one really does not want to say that people from Scotland can be taken in on a completely different basis from the people of England.
I am also concerned about the term “domiciled in England”, because I am not quite sure, legally, where it comes from. I do not know whether my hon. Friend the Member for Christchurch will explain it. I understand that with tax laws for which domicile is relevant, it is United Kingdom domicile that matters, although that may change with the Scotland Bill. I am not convinced that there is an agreed English domicile classification.
I want to elaborate a little more on academic freedoms. What is it that allows thought to develop? What allows us not just to produce people who can go into the workplace, fill jobs and earn a living, but allows that great development of thought that we have had in this country for hundreds of years? Whom should we go back to as our earliest notable philosopher? One could argue for Shakespeare or go back even further and argue for Chaucer, although one might think of them more as literary figures. One could start with Hobbs and Locke and the development of thought in which this country has been so powerfully involved. When talking about science, one could mention Boyle and Newton, both of whom had strong associations with our great universities. How did they achieve that? Yes, they sometimes got Government money: Chaucer was sponsored by the King and so was Shakespeare. Newton was the Master of the Mint and got an income from his service that allowed him to afford his academic studies. So, there is a connection between the state and academic excellence, but it is not a control: it is not the state saying, “You may do only these things or you must educate only these people.”
We must be very wary of putting constraints on our institutions. I hope that the Minister will consider this point in relation to the current state of legislation rather than just in regard to this Bill. Our institutions need to be free to take in the people whom they think best even though we might not agree that they are the best—indeed, they might seem to us not quite up to the mark. Our institutions might decide to take a bet on someone who has no academic qualifications, because they have been failed by their secondary school—such failure has been a problem—but who appears absolutely genius in quality. They might decide to take people who have that spark of intelligence and thoughtfulness that makes them interesting and exciting and means they can push on the great development of thought.
Many areas of university life are not covered by the academic subjects that are done up until A-level. There are developments that people need to take with a philosophy, politics and economics qualification.
Mr Hayes
I am grateful to my hon. Friend for giving way again. Is not that the paradox that lies at the heart of the paradigm set out by my hon. Friend the Member for Christchurch? He argues that universities should be free to select on the basis of merit but not free to select otherwise.
Jacob Rees-Mogg
I am in complete, almost sycophantic, agreement with the Minister on that. We really do not want to put on such constraints. Freedom is tremendously important.
I return briefly to the insidious argument that once one takes the Government’s shilling, one has to do what the Government say. It is very hard, as the recipient of the shilling, to say, “No, I am not going to do what the Government say.” It is much easier for a Government who love freedom, who believe in our ancient freedom and who see how strong this country has been because it is a free nation, to say, “We will give you this money—we will allow it to come to you through the students—but as we do so, we will take the shackles off and allow you to stand or fall by your own brilliance—your own success in admitting people.” We must assume that universities want to take the cleverest, the brightest and the best—those who will give the university glory when they go on to their future careers, those who may stay and ensure that its research is of the highest quality, or those who will become, like Cardinal Wolsey, so rich that they can establish new parts of the university.
In that way, our universities can have the freedoms enjoyed by some of the American universities, which have endowments running into tens of billions of dollars, allowing them a freedom from the American state and a freedom to take the best and the brightest from around the world and to fund them through their studies. Surely, that is what we must aim for. We must aim for an ambition that returns our universities to the status they had in the middle ages when they were places that people looked at with envy and when people who went to them, who could be supported in doing so, felt that attending them was the highest possible achievement.
Jacob Rees-Mogg
Yes and no, if I may sit on the fence. We should aim for excellence for everybody, and for as many people as possible to go to university, but university will do different things for different people. Not all higher and further education needs to be the same; we want to get the most from everybody, but the 50% target became a bit of a box-ticking exercise. Box-ticking exercises are a mistake. They do not lead to what we ought to focus on, which is not ad hoc bits of legislation that deal with—
Mr Hayes
Before my hon. Friend draws his introductory remarks to a conclusion and moves to the main thrust of his remarks, would he reflect on this? He calls for a return to a mediaval view of universities, but the truth is that in the middle ages illiterates were seduced by the mystery of book learning, because most people were illiterate. It may not be possible for us to return to that spirit, given the state of our age.
Jacob Rees-Mogg
I thank the Minister for that intervention, although I must say it was rather depressingly negative and uncharacteristic of him. What we really want to be thinking about is lifting people’s spirits. In the middle ages, people saw the joy and virtue of learning.
Jacob Rees-Mogg
We have to evolve. We have to move to a position where freedom is re-established. We are going from a position where most university funding is state-controlled to one where a large proportion of it will come from individuals. The Government would be in a ludicrous position if they were getting students to pay what was the Government’s money. That would not make sense. We have a wise, good and forthright Government, made up of some of the best brains ever born in this country. We are lucky. We know where we are going in terms of tuition fees; we have a well-thought through plan that will aid the independence of universities, particularly once we move through it and we find that the money is being paid back, the loan book can be run profitably and a major cost can be taken off the Government’s balance sheet. I am all in favour of student loans, which will help to achieve the Bill’s aims—the admission of people whom universities want because they have the ability to attend them.
Let me draw broadly to a conclusion.
Mr Hayes
Before my hon. Friend does so, I wonder whether we can bottom out the issue of the mediaeval attitude to university. The point that I made—I hope that I can make it a little more clearly now—is that it is hard to reproduce the magic of learning that prevailed in the middle ages because of the secrecy of literacy that then prevailed, too. That is not a pessimistic view—I believe in the power of learning, as he does—but in celebrating the middle ages’ perception of university, we must be realistic about how that magic has changed.
Jacob Rees-Mogg
The Minister says, “hard to reproduce”, and I accept that, but hard is not the same as impossible. We really ought to aim for learning to be held in the highest regard, because it will lead to our fundamental success and prosperity as a nation.
I should like to broaden the debate for a moment. We are facing decades of competition from countries that we could ignore for hundreds of years—countries that were so corrupt and broken that we could ignore them as we grew rich on manufacturing and services. Now, those nations—China, India, Brazil and Russia—are at the forefront of economic development. Their costs are lower than ours, and we see ourselves as a nation being overtaken. We can compete only if we have the best education in the world—an education that inspires millions of people and leads them to do great things with their lives and to come up with productive ideas.
Mr Hayes
Now we are finding common cause—are we not?—as my hon. Friend eloquently makes the case for the power of learning to change lives by changing life chances. Perhaps he might add to that by acknowledging what I think we share: a reverence for the past, for only the past can change the prism of our memories.
Jacob Rees-Mogg
I am in complete agreement with the Minister on the remark that we learn so much from the past. It gives us an understanding of what we ought to do in the future, and it helps us to avoid making mistakes. Many mistakes were made in the past, and we can sensibly avoid repeating them.
My hon. Friend the Member for Christchurch is noble in his principle. He is noble in wanting to ensure that education is free from the dead hand of state control, but I am sorry to say that his Bill goes about it the wrong way. Instead of getting the dead hand of state control and throwing it on the bonfire, he has severed the dead hand from the arm of state control and is leaving it lying, rotting on the university funding scheme. I say, “Get rid of this dead hand! Remove this dead hand. Get rid of it, finger by finger. Bury it a 1,000 feet deep. Free up our universities; free up the British people!” Let us have a system that is free from state control, where students and universities can do brilliant things, so that our country can be the success that it deserves to be.
The Minister for Further Education, Skills and Lifelong Learning (Mr John Hayes)
Benjamin Disraeli, the greatest Tory Prime Minister, said:
“A university should be a place of light, of liberty, and of learning.”
Our debate, albeit a short one, has given us the chance to explore some of those concepts. I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Christchurch (Mr Chope) for bringing forward the Bill because it has provided the opportunity to debate an extremely important topic.
Further and, in particular, higher education have attracted a great deal of debate in the House in recent weeks and months, and indeed they have been debated elsewhere, too. Key to that debate was the central issue, which the Bill addresses, of university access and admission policies, and learners’ opportunities for progression from further to higher education.
Let me say this, for if I did not, the House would wonder why, given the publication of the Wolf review yesterday: we should not confuse higher education with higher learning. It is absolutely right to say that our society and economy need people to aspire to higher learning. Britain’s future chance of success lies in being a high-tech, high-skilled nation, and because of that, we need to invest in the human capital of our work force through higher learning, although that may not always take place at a university. Opportunity may be found in the workplace and in our further education colleges to obtain the higher learning that will fuel economic success, which is the component part of our chance for growth and prosperity.
The short time available to me does not give me the opportunity to speak on that subject at as great a length as I would like, but I want to put on record that spreading that kind of opportunity—an opportunity to which my hon. Friend the Member for Christchurch drew the House’s attention—will necessitate, in my view and that of my right hon. Friend the Minister for Universities and Science, teaching more higher education and higher learning in our further education colleges. FE colleges are the unheralded triumph of our education system. They do immense good work, and of course they teach a great deal of higher education already. Their cohorts typically reflect the communities of which they are a part and are, by and large, more widely drawn than the cohorts that one typically finds in our universities. The private Member’s Bill of my hon. Friend the Member for Christchurch, inasmuch as it deals with access to those kinds of opportunities for higher education, draws our attention to where and how that might be provided, as well as to how people might obtain it.
I think that it is a matter of public record that I am no more a social engineer than my hon. Friend. Social engineering was mentioned by my hon. Friend the Member for Shipley (Philip Davies); I almost rose to intervene on him, but I did not want to interrupt the flow of his oratory, so I shall take the opportunity now to say that social engineering is on neither my agenda nor that of the Government of which I am part. I am a firm believer in meritocracy and the principle that people should be rewarded according to their efforts and abilities, whatever their circumstances or background. That principle is at the heart of the Government’s approach.
I reassure my hon. Friend the Member for Christchurch that merit is the driver of access, in the Government’s view. The reason for that is both practical and philosophical. The principle that people should prosper on the basis of their assiduity and talent lies at the very heart of the philosophy of the party to which we both belong—it is a bigger philosophy than that, though, and I will speak about that in a few moments. However, it is also a practical matter—a matter of ensuring that we harness the best talents in the interests of the nation—for also central to our mission is the promotion of the common good and the national interest. The national interest would hardly be served if we let any Giotto remain among the hill shepherds, to use Ruskin’s words. Every talent must have its opportunity to shine, and every kind of person must have their chance of glittering prizes.
That takes me to the middle ages, which we heard a great deal about earlier in this short debate, courtesy of my hon. Friend the Member for North East Somerset (Jacob Rees-Mogg). We enjoyed a brief exchange, but what did not emerge from it was the fundamental feature of the feudal and mediaeval appreciation of universities. That has been lost to some degree, because we have largely come to regard “feudal” and “mediaeval” as pejorative terms, but in fact my hon. Friend shed light on the interesting elements of the opportunities available then, which found their form in universities. Universities were then broad, liberal, rather radical places to which many people from many backgrounds were able to go. Far from being exclusive, they were rather inclusive. My hon. Friend mentioned Wolsey, who was a butcher’s son. I do not know whether my hon. Friend is the son of a butcher, but I had my chance to go to university and I am from a family for whom universities had previously been almost unknown—a distant and detached thing. Though that was certainly the case in the middle ages, later, universities became rather different things, but at the time, which might be described as a golden age, they were inclusive in the way that he described.
The other important philosophical principle to which I want to draw the House’s attention is something that is at the very heart of conservatism but is sometimes neglected—the elevation of the people. Benjamin Disraeli, whom I am determined should get at least two mentions in my short speech, laid out the tenets of conservatism in his Crystal palace speech and identified the elevation of the people as being central to them. That is why I am driven by a desire for social mobility and social justice, just as my hon. Friend the Member for Christchurch is. When considering the elevation of the people, we should properly consider their chance to gain learning as a way of progressing.
As my hon. Friend the Member for Christchurch will know, Alan Milburn was commissioned by the previous Government to consider these matters in considerable detail. He produced a report that looked at a series of inhibitors to social mobility, one of which, interestingly, was graduate recruitment. He observed that there was a time when someone could join a firm of lawyers or accountants and rise from being the tea boy to the top of the firm, but that is no longer so. It is interesting that graduate recruitment has, arguably, inhibited the social mobility that we all wish to see. It is certainly true that under the previous regime little was done to improve social mobility.
In those terms, the Milburn report is something of an embarrassment to the Labour party. It identifies access to education and educational opportunity as being critical to the mission I have described, but makes the point clearly that prior attainment limits people’s chance to progress into further and higher education. That point has been made at length. We cannot discuss admissions to universities without looking at applications, and all the evidence suggests not that the admissions system is prejudiced against people from under-represented groups but that too few of those people apply to university because of their prior attainment. We really have to get our schools system right if we want to drive the kind of social justice that lies at the heart of the Conservative party’s mission. My right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for Education has put in place a wide range of plans to do just that—to drive up standards, create opportunity and deliver the kind of outcome that I am describing. However, you would not let me speak about those too much, Mr Deputy Speaker, because it would be going a little off the subject. As part of our mission to elevate people, it is absolutely right to consider how we can get more people whose tastes and talents take them in the direction of higher learning to achieve their potential.
Now, let me draw attention to the core of what my hon. Friend the Member for Christchurch has said today. It is not just the Conservatives who are committed to social justice, although we are peculiarly committed to it. The whole coalition Government completely support the admirable principle that universities and colleges should offer places solely on merit. The Government seek to make far-reaching reforms of the further and higher education sectors, but there are some elements that we do not seek to change. Like other nations with outstanding higher education systems, we recognise that universities and colleges must continue to recruit on merit.
When I look at the issues that the Office for Fair Access must take into account in respect of access, I see no dichotomy between that commitment to merit and the list of considerations that universities are asked to take into account in respect of admissions. They are few but important and it is worth exploring them, because they are salient to our deliberations. The first is
“the scale and nature of outreach activity to be undertaken (singly or in partnership) with…schools and colleges—such as mentoring, school visits, student buddying”—
Not a word I would have used, Mr Deputy Speaker, but there we are—and
“master classes in schools.”
Is any of that incompatible with the principle of merit, I ask my hon. Friend the Member for Christchurch? It does not seem so to me.
Secondly, universities are asked to look at
“the scale and nature of outreach activity to be undertaken to attract mature students—including work with local communities.”
Can that be reconciled with the desire to see merit as the key determinant of admission? I think it certainly can.
The third component is
“the scale and nature of summer school programmes”
or similar initiatives in which universities are asked to engage. Is that an unhappy marriage with the nature of merit as a driver of access to university? Certainly not.
The fourth consideration is the number of financial waivers the university will offer, and the fifth is the requirement
“to participate in the new national scholarships programme, with bids match funded from…a university’s own resources.”
That will build on the long-standing tradition in our universities of bursaries, exhibitions and scholarships that have done a great deal to allow people from less advantaged backgrounds to achieve what they wish. None of that seems outside the scope of what the Bill seeks to secure.
The sixth consideration is
“targeting pupils with potential (use of contextual data, targeting low achieving schools) and improving aspiration and attainment through outreach.”
Let me say a word about that. I understand why someone might think that such targeting would be incompatible with the objectives of my hon. Friend the Member for Christchurch, but I disagree. Universities have always used interviews, for example, to determine someone’s potential. Many hon. Members are university graduates, and a number of them will have been interviewed before obtaining their place. Those interviews have for a long time been used as means for a university to get a more rounded impression of an individual’s potential, tastes and personality. Is that unreasonable? It does not seem unreasonable to me. It is certainly time-honoured, and you will understand, Mr Deputy Speaker, for you know my instincts and sentiments as well as anyone, that anything that is time-honoured holds a special place in my heart.
Jacob Rees-Mogg
I share the Minister’s sentiment about things being time-honoured, but does he agree that interviews are central to a tutorial system, because the tutor and pupil need to be able to work with one another over an extended period?
Jacob Rees-Mogg
To continue, Diogenes did not enjoy that relationship with Alexander, which is why he was unwilling to talk to him.
Mr Hayes
Now my hon. Friend encourages me to go down a classical road, which might be of interest to the House but certainly would not necessarily be relevant to the Bill, and I will not be encouraged to do that.
A consideration of potential has always been at the heart of the relationship between the teacher and the taught in the business of deciding where a person might go, having been admitted to an institution. I will not say that I was shocked—it is hard to be shocked in the House—but I was surprised by what the shadow Minister said. He might want to correct this—I do not want to damage his career unreasonably, although it will be in opposition of course—but he at least appeared to suggest that the Opposition’s policy was hostile to the very business of universities interviewing students. That would require unprecedented prescription over independent universities. It would be a curious Government and a curious Minister who told universities that they were forbidden to use what they had used successfully, perhaps for generations, as a means of choosing who was best suited to their institutions.