Higher and Further Education

Keith Vaz Excerpts

Tuesday 11th September 2012 Commons Chamber

[Keith Vaz (Leicester East) (Lab)]

I have met some of the students at London Met. It is not just a question of being financially worse off; some had come to the end of their degrees and had been asked to take re-sits when they were six weeks away from getting their PhDs. It is very important that no matter what the Government have done—they may have done the right thing; the courts will decide in the end—genuine students should not lose out as a result of their decision.

[Shabana Mahmood]

My right hon. Friend, who is Chair of the Home Affairs Committee, has been speaking up powerfully on behalf of genuine international students at London Metropolitan university, and I commend him for his efforts in trying to protect them from the impact of the decision to revoke its highly trusted status. He is absolutely right. Genuine international students who have paid huge sums of money for the privilege of a UK higher education and who have come to the end, or almost the end, of their studies at London Met should at least have been given the opportunity to continue and complete them there rather than have to scramble around to find an alternative institution that might take them. It seems entirely right that new international students are prevented from coming to London Met until these issues are resolved, probably through the courts system, but those who were already here and were genuine international students should not have had to suffer in this way.

This is one of the hardest years for universities, which begin the year 20,000 places down thanks to 10,000 places being directly cut by the Government and a further 10,000 being taken away because of the discredited, and frankly chaotic, core and margin policy. Core and margin was a deliberate attempt to force fees down—but crucially, not to benefit students but because the Minister got his sums wrong when he, the Business Secretary, who is sitting next to him, the Deputy Prime Minister and the Prime Minister were busy telling everybody that £9,000 would be the exception rather than the norm and that the average would be much more like £7,500. We now know that that is not how things panned out. To cover that up, and no doubt to get the Treasury off his back, the Minister introduced his core and margin policy. That policy does not put students at the heart of the system. First, it sends a dangerously conflicting message about the cost of tuition. On the one hand, the Government tell students that they can afford £9,000 a year because of the repayment terms, but on the other they try to show that cheaper courses are a good option for those put off by the top level of £9,000. It also acts as an inverse pupil premium. Incentivising poorer students to take up cheaper courses means that they are entering into a higher education experience with the least being spent on them, their learning resources, their activities and their institution. This undermines the Deputy Prime Minister’s pupil premium policy, and there is a risk that it will further entrench educational inequality in the UK.