Lifelong Learning (Higher Education Fee Limits) Bill (First sitting)

Lloyd Russell-Moyle Excerpts

Committee stage
Tuesday 21st March 2023 Public Bill Committees

[The Chair]

Given our time constraints, we have time for just one quick last question.

[Lloyd Russell-Moyle (Brighton, Kemptown) (Lab/Co-op)]

Q First, I draw attention to my registered interest in the universities sector.

I am interested in what you were touching on in respect of the wraparound pastoral care that you offer students. I studied my masters over three years, part time at the University of Sussex, but I was a student throughout the whole of it, so the university was able to offer that wraparound care. In a modular system, in which people pay for modules and may come back in a year or two, how will you be able to offer that continuing care? Even if they have breaks of only a few months, they might still need some kind of care as a student. Have you considered how you would organise that?

Professor Press: Every university will have a different answer to that. My university provides close care—

[The Chair]

Professor Press, I am sorry but, given the constraints of time and the fact that we have many other witnesses, I am afraid I have to end your session there. I thank you immensely for taking the time to give evidence to our Committee.

Examination of Witnesses

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[The Chair]

Given the pressures on time, may I ask questioners and witnesses to be brief?

Ellen Thinnesen: I think it will make a substantial difference to disadvantaged students. For example, many of our disadvantaged students have caring responsibilities or are single parents, so to be able to attend education and study flexibly, on a credit, modularised basis, will make a significant difference. Removing the equivalent level qualification regulation is really important, because many of our disadvantaged students have progressed into higher education but, unfortunately, have obtained HE qualifications that are not relevant to the technical careers that they want to go into. This measure allows those students to go back and retrain, upskill and relearn.

Liz Bromley: I endorse everything my colleagues have said. One of the greatest disadvantages that disadvantaged students have is lack of confidence—you know, they say, “Families like ours don’t go to university.” This is a wonderful opportunity to build up confidence that they can access the system and understand how it works. It helps them manage this notion of terrible debt because they can do it on a much small scale. While concurring absolutely with everything my colleagues say, I think this is just as important for young people as for those who are reskilling or coming back later in life. The phasing is really important, because it is part of getting their confidence built up at levels 4 and 5. It is a great way to enter the HTQ market, and that is the basis on which young people, as well as reskillers, can think, “I’ve done this. I could top up and get a full degree. I am in one of those families who can achieve.” I think that is terrific.

[Lloyd Russell-Moyle]

Q I am interested in the workforce. Liz, you mentioned the need to manage the workforce; if we are to have, in effect, all-year-round entry, with people able to join at different points, will there be additional workforce costs? The workforce in the further education sector is one of the worst paid workforces in the education sector overall, because the funding for your sector has been among the worst overall. Are there some challenges, given that staff have never been paid as much as, say, university sector staff?

Liz Bromley: One of the biggest challenges that my colleagues and I face is that we have a finite amount of resource and it has to be split between pay costs and non-pay costs. I think in the implementation of the system we will incur significant non-pay costs in terms of our systems and administration, to get all the points that Ellen referred to about the ILR and the data collection correct. That will have a knock-on effect on our ability to raise pay.

We already have a real challenge in attracting people from industry—the industry experts—to come and teach, because they can earn so much more in industry. What would be wonderful—I would say this, wouldn’t I?—would be an injection of funding to see this through so that we can improve pay and address the workload issues. I think that would cause the workforce to embrace this far more willingly.

[Lloyd Russell-Moyle]

Q Of course, in the FE sector you are paid less per head than people in schools or in universities—it kind of dips at a crucial time—so that is a fair point.

I wonder about the modulisation discussion we have been having, and employers. I am supportive of the measures, as I have heard you are, but is there a danger that employers push staff members to use their credits, and then when staff members actually want to make a career change their credits have all been used up because the employer has forced them to do modules that, really, they should have paid for? Should there be some provisions in the Bill to make it clear that credits are personal and should not be used for in-work professional development? Is that possible?

Ellen Thinnesen: This is one of the areas that I am concerned about, knowing a number of employers that I work with, the constraints they are under and what they have done with their own professional development budgets. I would need to go away and think about that, but in the same sense I encourage you to think about it and explore the problem in a little more detail, because I do think it needs some consideration.

[Lloyd Russell-Moyle]

Q Alun, you are nodding along; did you want to say anything about the safeguards that might need to be in the Bill?

Alun Francis: I am with Ellen on this: I have not thought it through sufficiently to give a really punchy answer to your question, but I do think it is a concern. It is about the balance of who should pay for training. It feels like there is the potential for it to skew perhaps too much towards the employer encouraging learners to pay for training that the employer could pay for. How we police that, I do not know. There is a variety of things that we might explore in more detail, but I cannot give you a really clear sense of how we would solve that problem right now.

[Sir David Evennett]

Q I am particularly interested in potential older students who are in employment and want to progress or change their careers. First, I welcome what you have said about business involvement, but now that we have a new framework—or will do, hopefully, when the Bill is passed—what can you do to try to get more employers involved who have not expressed interest in the past?

Secondly, you highlighted how hard you have worked, Ellen, to reach the disadvantaged, and I am sure that your two colleagues are doing the same. How are you doing outreach to those who are in employment to let them know what you offer?

Ellen Thinnesen: In terms of the work we do with employers to help them to understand what is available, which I think is what the question was about, in a college such as mine, and I know in many other colleges, we employ business development teams—essentially employer liaison personnel—whose entire job is to work with employers and help them to understand how they can translate their workforce development needs into workforce solutions and upskill and reskill their workforce. That is easier for larger colleges such as mine; I can flex funding and use it in creative and different ways. We go back to the underfunded nature of colleges and the impact on smaller colleges, where it is incredibly difficult to do that.

On outreach, we employ a significant number of school liaison personnel, who are out working on a daily and weekly basis in schools giving careers information, advice and guidance, and delivering training to school teachers and staff. Again, I am able to do that, as I am sure Liz is in Newcastle College Group, because we are large enough to be able to reconfigure our budget to invest in resources such as that. Again, for smaller colleges, that is not always possible.

For example, my college merged with a sixth form in 2017, which now benefits from that service. Prior to the merger, it would never have been able to deliver that type of infrastructure to enable employers to understand what they need to do and what is available, and to enhance outreach.

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[Matt Western]

Q Finally, can I just ask you about the future of the apprenticeship levy? It is currently not written into, or not within, this legislation. How do you see that sitting alongside the lifelong loan entitlement and the role for employers?

Professor Peck: Yes; I do think many employers will make use of the modular learning that the lifelong loan entitlement will promote. I think many employers will pay for their staff to do some of this upskilling and reskilling as part of investment in their training more broadly, which takes place outside the levy. I think there are some challenges at the moment about the levy and its size, aren’t there? We might be getting to a point where much of the levy is now being committed around apprenticeships, which is a real success. The question is: how do we keep apprenticeships growing over the next five to 10 years? That is for a very different group of staff. Apprenticeships often are for new starters or people completely changing their career with an employer, whereas the LLE is about modules enabling people to upskill and reskill when they are already in the workforce and established in the workforce.

[Lloyd Russell-Moyle]

Q At the moment, students come and study part-time or via the workplace. Predominantly, who pays for those courses?

Professor Peck: It is a really mixed picture. Some are paid for by employers and some will be paid for by individuals who have the means to do so. Those are the two major sources that we currently accept.

[Lloyd Russell-Moyle]

Q Do you have a “finger in the wind” kind of breakdown between own-paid for and employer-paid for?

Professor Peck: At NTU, the vast majority of UK undergraduate students are paid for by the Student Loans Company loans. We have some students undertaking short courses, which are professional qualifications and paid for by their employers, and about 2,000 apprentices who are, again, paid for by their employers. At the moment, it is heavily weighted towards full-time undergraduates, and I think that is the challenge that the LLE is trying to unlock.

[Lloyd Russell-Moyle]

Q I was trying to exclude the full-time undergraduate. I am trying to get at if there is a danger that, for some of those who might already be accessing technical, part-time, upskilling skills courses that are paid for by their employers, the employers will shift that burden on to the students. My follow-up question, which I have asked to other panel members, is do you believe there are other things that can be done to ensure that employers do not shift that burden—for example, in regulation putting things that make it clear that this is for personal, not professional, development?

Professor Peck: It is a really interesting challenge. One of the things that the short course pilot should tell us, even if they are relatively small numbers, is how many trainers are paying for themselves through taking out a loan with the SLC and how many are coming in through employers. There is a suggestion that there are bigger numbers doing those modular programmes but actually they are being paid for by employers. I have not seen the data on that yet, but I am trying to get those data to see if that is the case.

I think most employers would see it as part of their responsibility to pay for training their current employees. Indeed, they might want to do that in a different way from doing it employee by employee. In sufficient numbers, you would commission your own training; that happens already. It is important to ensure that we are not transferring the cost from employers to the individual employee. I think how you do that is a really interesting question, which probably bears more consideration, but there may be ways of ensuring that that does not happen.

[Katherine Fletcher (South Ribble) (Con)]

Q Thank you so much for your evidence. As we transition into this new world, I am interested in hearing your expert view on where you are seeing immediate demand—for example, the renewable energy retrofit gets discussed regularly in Lancashire. Could you give us the top three from both of your perspectives?

Julie Charge: The main one we are seeing is around computer science; that is definitely top of the agenda. The other ones for us in terms of all the range of skills are things like the artificial intelligence and robotics space, and absolutely sustainability. That understanding of sustainability actually touches a lot of subjects, whether that is housing through the retrofit or others. Those are the three areas that are definitely at the top at the moment.

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[Andy McDonald]

Q You appear to be somewhat sanguine about heaping yet further choice and complexity into an already complex system. Is that a genuine reflection of your concerns?

Sir David Bell: I do think it gets a bit more complicated, and we are in the process of trying to work out how we can address those complexities. I would go back to the point that Rachel made. I have not had the chance to say it, but I too want to say that this is a really positive development if it is giving people more opportunities to undertake additional education at different stages of life. That is a very good thing. We want to make it work, and if it is a bit more complicated than perhaps the system has been up until now, there is an onus on all of us to ensure that we provide the right kind of guidance and support. There are all kinds of players in that regard. Reference was made to the work in Sunderland through DWP, which is a really good source of advice. There is the university or college itself, and independent advice and careers guidance. All of that has to connect, so that people get the right advice in what I think will be a slightly more complicated system under this reform.

[Lloyd Russell-Moyle]

Q I am interested in the additional costs for institutions. Rachel, you touched on that. Do you think there need to be some additional payments to institutions to incentivise them to do this? Who should look after students between modules? Who should offer that ongoing support? Should it be the institution, or should there be another body?

Rachel Sandby-Thomas: That is a really good question. Let me do the first part first, because that is a slightly easier question. I do not want to appear as if I am putting out a begging bowl and saying, “Yes, please—more money,” but I do think it would help. There are certain one-off costs, such as the reconfiguration of SITS. Seed funding happens quite a lot. Little pilots are started, and a little bit of money is given to get a bit of resource in. Everybody gets used to the fact that it is there, and then they just keep it. Universities are very good at responding to that initial incentive, absorbing it and making it part of their resource base as they move forward, so I think that that would be welcome. If we want this policy to take hold, which we do, it would be money well spent.

The second part of your question is really tricky. I know that policy makers very often go to the most nefarious possible outcome: the wily student who might have mental health problems and thinks, “Aha! I can get a far better service if I do a 1,000 module at Warwick. I’ll just stay on for ages and ages, and get great-value mental health services that are not publicly or privately available for that money.” That would not be a good outcome. However, I am a firm believer that most people are not nefarious, and we should be regulating for the majority of players with good intent rather than evil intent.

There has to be a cut-off at some point, otherwise somebody could do one module but be able to access the library and take up library space forever and ever. On whether somebody should hold things in between, I do not quite know who that would be. There probably needs to be a bit of a time-bound associated status. You do not want to just chuck somebody out the door as soon as they have finished a course. That is not what universities want—universities want stickiness with their graduates and students—but nor do we want loads of library space blocking. There should be a bit of a time-bound lapse.

[Robert Halfon]

Q I want to ask you both about credit transfer. It will obviously be for the institution to decide on this—where people move their courses if they decide to transfer. There are good examples of this taking place already, as you well know. How will this work in practice? Will it be embraced by colleges and HE institutions?

Rachel Sandby-Thomas: As you rightly say, we do credit transfer sometimes, but it tends to be in the minority of students. The 2+2 course is a good example of that—generally students will do two years at a college and come to us for the final two years—but we know that college well, we know what they are teaching and we know the standards the students get to at the end of their two years at college, and that makes for an easy progression to us. That makes it much easier. There will be a lot more work if this really takes off, because we will have to get to know, assess and understand that prior learning in order to be able to recognise it. It would be a short-sighted kindness to allow a student who is not properly prepared to come on to a module if they have not reached the standard needed for that module. It might seem a kindness, but it does them no favours at all.

Sir David Bell: Making credit transfer work is a very important requirement if the lifelong loan entitlement is to work, because people will want to move between institutions. If we hold the mirror up to ourselves, I think universities also have to be a bit more liberal in this regard; we can at times be a bit sniffy when it comes to the qualifications that have been accrued in another institution. As Rachel said, there are a lot of good examples of this happening where you know your partner institutions. As a sector, we have to show that we are engaged in this by having better credit transfer arrangements without putting enormous bureaucratic hurdles in the way of students, who think, “Why can’t I transfer from this place to that place?”

Lifelong Learning (Higher Education Fee Limits) Bill (Second sitting)

Lloyd Russell-Moyle Excerpts

Committee stage
Tuesday 21st March 2023 Public Bill Committees

[Gill Furniss]

Q You have more or less answered quite a few of my questions. My concerns are about the disparity in pay between school and FE and between FE and HE. It worries me that this proposal cannot be successful unless the Government put in some investment to make it more equitable, because, as you say, recruitment and retention is a massive difficulty, particularly in specialist subject areas where people can earn far more in business. Do you agree?

David Hughes: I completely agree, and it looks as though it might get worse in the short term. The Government are negotiating with the teachers’ unions at the moment; if teachers get a better settlement, the gap between schoolteacher pay and college lecturer pay will get wider. It will get even more difficult. I know that the Minister is aware of that; I have talked to him about it. It is a difficult one, but we absolutely need college staff to be paid the right wage to attract and retain them.

[Lloyd Russell-Moyle (Brighton, Kemptown) (Lab/Co-op)]

Q Following on from that, given the modulisation and the ability for people to draw down things and then use the credits in other institutions later on in life to build up a portfolio of higher education, is there a danger that some universities will be less willing to take on students who need additional support and will wind up pushing them into the Association of Colleges members to do the work that sometimes they have to do? We see that a bit in the American system. People go to a community college, which is where the heavy lifting is done to get someone ready to learn, and then they go off and do their final year at an institution, and the institution gets all the kudos. Is there a danger of something similar happening with this?

David Hughes: I think it is happening now. It happens as part of the system. We have a system in which if you have good level 3 and good A-level results or BTEC results, you get into a university. If you are an adult and you have not got quite the same simple set of results, it is much harder to get into a university, and colleges open their arms to that group of people. So we already have that schism between a university sector that does not include those people and a college sector that does. It might get worse. A lot of adults need to build their confidence and learn how to learn, and colleges are very good at doing that. Often universities are not as good at doing that. They can teach someone a subject and can teach the research. Colleges are experts at teaching and universities are experts at research. Somehow we need to accept that and applaud it and use it to deliver to the right people.

[Lloyd Russell-Moyle]

Q Is that fair? When we talk about the cost basis we are talking about the same for both institutions rather than understanding that colleges, rather than having less than they have at the moment, might need more to do this than a university would.

David Hughes: Yes, I think that is absolutely right. If you think about the extra learner needs and the high number of young people and adults in FE colleges with additional learning needs and disabilities, it is enormous—much higher than in any other sector. That learning support needs to be fully invested in. Students tend to come from poorer backgrounds as well, so bursaries and support with their finances are equally important.

[Lloyd Russell-Moyle]

Q Finally, could I ask about diversion from what employers are paying at the moment? The Association of Colleges will have lots of your members running adult education and lifelong learning courses that employers pay for because they want to upskill their workers. Are there significant protections in the Bill to stop employers offloading that to the personal debt of the individual and then not putting the professional development money in that they should do?

David Hughes: I think employers in this country generally pay less than in other OECD countries, so we are not doing very well on employer investment. Some employers are brilliant; many are not. I think there are massive dangers. We need to make sure that universities, colleges and private providers do not allow that to happen, because I am absolutely certain that some employers will want to do that. In my 32 years’ experience of working with employers and skills, we know that some will want to game the system, so we absolutely need to be alert to that. It will be a small number, but it could be significant. We must think about how to drive that out of the system. The providers need to make sure they are not playing that game as well.

[The Chair]

I am afraid we have run out of time, so there is no time for further questions. Thank you very much for your contribution to the Committee this afternoon, David Hughes.

Examination of Witnesses

Dr Elizabeth Norton and Professor Sue Rigby gave evidence.

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[Katherine Fletcher]

Fine—now I understand you. Ecology might not be top of the list—I am a biologist who did a lot of ecology so I can say it—and that is a bit like archaeology. The initial stuff at level 4, 5 and, ideally, 6 could be more granular in detail and perhaps more obviously tied to a job—moving satellites around in space or whatever. Thank you very much for putting up with my questions.

[Lloyd Russell-Moyle]

Q That was very interesting. At the moment with a three-year degree something that protects students from universities completely destroying their course is that universities have to honour the programme they started with. You will allow a cohort to continue. I have been in many fights while representing the unions when universities have done that. I should make a reference to my entry in the Register of Members’ Financial Interests on that. With a modularisation process over 10 years, is there a danger that someone starts a process of collecting credits and modules that they want to pursue over a long period and ends up at a dead end, where they have used up all their money and credits but are not able to get the degree because it does not exist any more? How can that be mitigated?

Professor Rigby: I do not think we can avoid that risk. If we imagine that the lifelong loan entitlement will be drawn down from 18 to 50, that is 30 years of continuity, and we have not had 30 years of continuity in higher education in the last century. It is quite possible that an organisation or, indeed, a subject area would cease to exist during that time. You are working from the premise that people would start an LLE in a modular form always intending to get a degree as an outcome, and I am not sure that they would not then just do a degree, because they could do that at any age. The commitment of time might stop them, but I doubt that many people over 30 years would have their eyes set exactly on a particular degree outcome; they would surely be moving in and out of the workplace, revisiting their own choices of modularity. It would be lovely if those modules stacked so that they end up as a generic degree, but I would have thought that the risk is only if we over-specify what that degree would be on graduation. If we say it is a geology degree, that is fine. If we say it is a palaeontology degree on vertebrates that can only be delivered by the University of Bristol, we would have to be assuming that it would have continuity of delivery through 40 years. It probably could, but others might not.

[Lloyd Russell-Moyle]

Q So there has to be some acceptance in other courses and pathways and possibly other institutions of these credits and modules. That happens on a case-by-case basis, building up institutions’ networks. Does there need to be more co-ordination or somewhere for that information to be published, so that, rather than having to go to a university and find out whether it accepts a module, a student can go to a portal and see whether a module is accepted and where they can transfer it, or is that unnecessary?

Professor Rigby: It is complicated. It would be adorable, but universities will always have the right to reject people. My son went for an interview at Oxford, and he did not get in. His qualifications were recognised; he just was not quite over the line. Universities will always have the capacity to be selective, and that means that any qualification may be insufficient for entry. I suspect that for the bulk of people, the reason for their not being admitted would be something other than the status of the qualification they have brought through the LLE.

[Lloyd Russell-Moyle]

Q Where would the support come from for people wanting to design that journey, not from the institution’s point of view but from the learner’s perspective, to understand what those modules mean, rather than just having lots of institutions shouting at them, “Come to us”?

Dr Norton: That is where the OfS can step in. The student protection directions under the OfS have needed a review for quite a long time, but they are certainly not capable of dealing with the level of consumer protection that the LLE will demand. As Professor Rigby said, we cannot have a totally pick-and-mix approach; there would need to be certain pathways followed and competencies gained as someone bundles together, so that they can learn in the proper order. The OfS can step in and provide advice and guidance. It already has Discover Uni, which contains a lot of information regarding student outcomes, and that could be added to one of its websites.

[Lloyd Russell-Moyle]

Q At the moment, a student who is choosing different modules in a course will have guidance from their institution—for example, they will speak to their tutor, who will say, “Actually, maybe that’s not the best one to do”—to make sure they are following the right pathway. Should it just be the Office for Students, or do institutions have a role in that beyond the fixed period during which someone has studied with them?

[The Chair]

It will have to be a short answer.

Professor Rigby: Any institution will have a vested interest in giving that advice, because having put all the effort into recruiting somebody and training them and realising they can learn with us, we will not want to lose them later on. The risk is that it will be partial advice, not impartial advice. The assumption has to be that the lifelong loan entitlement will be something that someone takes through mature adulthood, so they can temper to an extent their own expectations with an increasing degree of curatorial ability as they move through a career. In a sense, we are presupposing that people will remain ignorant of this system, whereas actually, they will quickly work out what works in it and what works less well, and those mores will guide someone through a career. It is not like they will do it all immediately and with the open-mindedness that we are presupposing before it starts, I suspect.