Higher Education and Research Bill

Lord Bew Excerpts

Committee: 4th sitting (Hansard - continued): House of Lords
Wednesday 18th January 2017 Lords Chamber

[Lord Desai (Lab)]

My Lords, I shall speak also to Amendment 133B. They are pretty straightforward. They concern the notion that students should not feel that they are being discriminated against; they should not actually be discriminated against and they should not perceive that they are being discriminated against. The suggestion is that there should be blind-testing as far as possible—and if blind-testing is not possible, there should be a second examiner who should not know the name of the students.

Amendment 133B applies the same principle to admissions. BAME students in particular feel the possibility of discrimination, so this is to reassure them. I beg to move.

[Lord Bew (CB)]

My Lords, I rise briefly to support the amendments in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Desai. I learned earlier this evening that he taught at the University of Pennsylvania, as did I and the noble Lord, Lord Norton of Louth. That university is about to be further distinguished by the fact that one of its alumni is to become President of the United States in two days’ time. But I did not agree with his saying that it is easy to assess university teaching, partly because of the mixture of research that is involved with teaching and the difficulties of making judgments in that area.

I will come to this issue in Amendment 189, in my name, but there is a real danger that the Government are aiming for a spurious scientificity in their attempt to deal with the problem. On the other hand, Amendments 133A and 133B hit on something that can and should be dealt with to protect students’ interests. It shows greater objectivity in the treatment of students, which is all the more necessary in the epoch we are now in, when these matters are greatly disputed, much more than they were a generation ago. Broadly speaking, it is easier, and I think more appropriate, to meet the requirements of the government manifesto by aiming at things which actually hit at what I might call the fecklessness of university teachers—not marking properly or quickly enough, not being good enough at getting in contact, not replying to emails. Those are things that legislation should be aiming to correct to protect teachers, but it should not aim at a spurious scientific metric, which is quite a dangerous thing to do.

The thinking behind Amendments 133A and 133B, in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Desai, is very solid and goes to the heart of putting, as the Minister said, the student and the legitimate protection of the student’s interests at the heart of things, rather than seeking a bogus popularity among students. This is a legitimate concern for students and they have a right to be protected in this matter.

[Lord Watson of Invergowrie]

My Lords, as someone who is not an academic, I find it quite surprising that amendments of this sort should be necessary, but given that they have been moved and supported by very long-established academics, it is clear that there is an issue here. I thought that that blind-marking assessment was what happened all the time in the established universities, but it may not be the situation in some of the newer or smaller providers, and the question is what will happen with some of the future providers. To me, this is something any student should have a right to expect. Nobody, whatever their background, should be discriminated against, consciously or unconsciously, by whoever is involved in marking an assessment. If we are being told by academics, as it appears we are, that these amendments are necessary, I would certainly want to support them. I hope the Minister will take it in good faith that they are necessary.

Higher Education and Research Bill

Lord Bew Excerpts

Report: 2nd sitting (Hansard): House of Lords
Wednesday 8th March 2017 Lords Chamber

I have one quick word on gold, silver and bronze. It is my understanding that although this system is being used in the first pilot, which I think will be completed in April, it will not necessarily stick. Although the Government are convinced that there must be some sort of distinction between the very best, the not-so-good and the really not too good at all, I think there will be a much subtler way of going about it. With any luck, it will not be restricted to just three categories. I hope that, as this system of analysis—the teaching excellence framework—becomes more familiar, it will be welcomed by the sector and by most of us.

[Lord Bew (CB)]

My Lords, I support Amendment 69, which is in my name and that of the noble Lord, Lord Lipsey. I have to declare my interest as an elderly pedagogue—as a visiting professor at King’s College London, where the college itself has just produced a statement with its students union. As it happens, and totally coincidentally, this is broadly in line with the arguments that I am about to advance.

I am well aware of the concessions made in this area and grateful to the Government for them. They have gone a considerable way but I am still not convinced that the Government are fully aware of the dangers implicit in a survey of the NSS sort. These dangers are very real, given the Government’s other stated objectives in higher education. For example, at an earlier stage of the debate the Minister praised the Athena SWAN scheme, which is designed to promote the role of women in higher education. But it should be noted that Erasmus University has carried out a survey in similar style to that of the NSS scheme, which demonstrates a clear in-built bias in student reporting against women. The bias was about 11% against women lecturers. There is therefore a real problem.

Anybody involved in this who has looked at these student survey reports, as I did during my 25 years as a professor in the university in Belfast, knows that there are real dangers of bias—and that is one of them. In one case, I have seen the outstanding scholar in the field—in the world—referred to in the most dismissive terms because a scholar is essentially eccentric, and there is not the toleration among young people today of eccentricity that there was a generation ago. It is as simple as that and it is worth making that point.

Secondly, there is the problem of racism. Again, I am absolutely certain that the Government’s approach in this respect is sound and good. In fact, the Minister in the other place, Jo Johnson, has identified himself very much with the race equality charter in higher education, in which the noble Baroness, Lady Lawrence, has played a significant role. There is no question of where the Government stand on this matter. None the less, I hope that attention will be paid to a paper on this problem produced at the University of Reading by Adrian Bell and Chris Brooks. It shows, in a very calm and not overstated way, from a review of the literature that there is potentially a racist bias. There is certainly something that looks like a bias in favour of white professors in this sort of exercise. There are problems of racism and sexism. There was a very good discussion of this in an article by Chris Havergal in the Times Educational Supplement on 14 August 2016.

Finally, as I have said before, I am an elderly pedagogue, and I have some experience of looking at student assessment forms. We are in this position for two principal reasons. I absolutely accept that across the House we want to see the TEF succeed. One reason is that, once one moves to fees, I am afraid that something like this is absolutely inevitable. The other reason is that the research assessment exercise, which began in a very low-key, relatively amateur way in our universities, became much more specialised. Its format had to be improved. It was not just that scholars and universities had their attention directed towards doing research because that is how your career is made, but because vast amounts of ordinary university time was spent in gaming the exercise. Everybody involved in this knows that this is the case. In other words, we were seeking a spurious scientific metric: “Is a quarter of an article in this journal equal to a third of an article in another journal?”. So it went on. Noble Lords will be amazed, but everybody who works in universities knows that what I am saying is true. The amount of time spent by academics in meetings on this!

I have a vision of how this Bill began in the mind’s eye of a Government. About 10 years ago, there was a story in the Daily Mail in which students went to their professor’s door and found a note saying, “Sorry I can’t be here to teach you this afternoon as I have to go to London for a meeting of the research assessment panel”. That professor would know that his vice-chancellor would never say that that was inappropriate. If we have already made a mistake in doubling down on a pseudo-scientific, over-elaborate metric without realising its dangers, we should not repeat it when it comes to teaching.

[Baroness O'Neill of Bengarve (CB)]

My Lords, I believe we can get this right. I declare, or confess, a life spent in higher education. We saw a great wave of—let us say—enthusiastic assumptions that we could get rankings, and then sobriety struck. I was very pleased to see this morning on the BBC education news that Singapore, which was a hotbed of ranking, has decided that it is not the way in which to assess children’s learning, and I do not think it is the way to assess undergraduate or postgraduate learning. It is important that we should be looking not for rankings but for excellence. The reason we should not be looking for rankings is fundamentally that we are looking for excellence, as far as it can be achieved. If you merely rank, you do not know who is excellent. It could be the case that the top-ranked were nevertheless not excellent or that, very fortunately, there was a great deal of excellence even in the middle of the rankings, so let us get rid of rankings and look for excellence.