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.

--- Later in debate ---

[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.