Higher Education: Funding

Lord Judd Excerpts

Wednesday 27th October 2010 Lords Chamber

[Lord Judd]

My Lords, I, too, thank the Minister for having introduced today's debate in such a civilised manner. I also congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Boswell, on his maiden speech. I have had the opportunity over the years to work with the noble Lord on the issues of education in the Commonwealth. It is good to see him among our number, bringing his experience to bear.

I am privileged to be a member of the courts of Newcastle and Lancaster universities, and a governor of the LSE. I also do a certain amount of professional advisory work with De Montfort University. They are all exciting universities with very different roles to play. However, I am a resident of Cumbria and it would be quite wrong to participate in this debate without bringing to the attention of the House the anxiety that exists among the academic and student community in the new university there about its future and survival, and what the funding issues mean for them. These issues must be resolved without delay.

Our first objective—this has been a repeated theme in the debate today—should be to establish the purpose of higher education, and indeed of education as a whole. There is of course a functional, utilitarian role of enabling society and the economy to operate. However, there is also the visionary, creative role, which ensures that we have questioning, inquiry that is critical in the best sense, and self-fulfilled and confident citizens—not just sophisticated consumers, but citizens playing a positive role in open democracy, able to ask questions, not just to tick boxes. It ensures a society where originality is valued—a society marked by its qualitative characteristics, not merely its quantitative dimensions. Hence the vital significance of the arts: of classics, literature, music, sculpture, design and, not least, architecture.

The challenge, I believe, is that still literally hundreds of thousands go to their graves without realising their potential or what they could have been. In a society capable of so much scientific and technological achievement, it seems an absolute disgrace that we still tolerate this situation. However, we must not confuse vocational training and education. Of course, we must have the advanced skills to produce sustainable growth and wealth but this cannot be an end in itself. History, I suggest, will judge us by what we do with the wealth that we generate and not just by the quantity of that wealth.

That brings us to the issue of debt. At the moment, our society is totally preoccupied with it, and the Government constantly remind us about the dreadful nature of debt. I find it an amazing contradiction that we can merrily embark on a system which says that it is absolutely natural for students and large numbers of people to start their lives with a huge debt and that this is a culturally inescapable part of our society, when at the same time our society says that debt is wrong on a national level and the Government tell us every day that they cannot do anything because of debt. It is difficult to overestimate the fear of debt which exists in many of our less affluent, well endowed communities.

Before we take a look at the proposals, perhaps I may add one other word. Why do we always accept—we have heard it said in the debate this evening—that it is not practical to think of free higher education when we do not question free primary and secondary education? The truth is that, as in so much of the qualitative side of life, ours is a society which puts a higher premium on private affluence than on public wealth. Until we get that balance right, we will always struggle to find imperfect solutions. Basically, we have sold out on the principle of saying that we can have a decent society only if we give priority to public wealth and public well-being.

With regard to the other proposals, perceptions matter. In the universities in which I am involved, I have worked quite hard on issues of access and I am fairly certain that, with apprehension about still-larger debts, there will be a psychological effect on access. I have only one slight difference with my noble friend Lady Morris of Yardley in what I thought was a brilliant speech. She said that if people want to get to university, they will find the funds to pay for it. I know of communities where there is no aspiration whatever because people have not been exposed to the opportunities. Really deprived communities in which what my noble friend said is just not true can be found on the west coast of Cumbria. People do not think about universities as relevant to them, and there is all sorts of potential trapped in that reality.

I believe that, whether it is intentional or not, there is a danger that the proposals could produce two tiers within our higher education system, both within individual universities and between universities. I fear that there will be an increasing tendency for students to study what they think they can afford and what will produce a quick income rather than what they really want to study and have the capability of studying. I also suggest—there has been allusion to this, but we know it—that in the real world wealthy universities will attract big endowments and big financial support, and those that are less wealthy will continue to struggle, so the differences will grow. There is also the question of international comparisons. This has not been mentioned but is it not possible that some potentially good students will say, “Hang on a moment. I can get a rather good university education at a much smaller cost in France or Germany. Why do I have to have all this struggle with debt in my own society?”? It was even put to me the other day that someone might decide that they can get a rather good university education at Cape Town, with all the stimulus of studying in a completely different environment. Why accumulate all this debt to study in this country? Of course, that underlines the greater emphasis that other societies give to public wealth and well-being.

Above all, I join my noble friend Lord Giddens in stressing the qualitative future of our society and the fact that this depends as much on the arts and social sciences as on physical quantitative dimensions. Philosophy, ethics, psychology, anthropology and sociology are all crucial to making a success of our society, and it is just stupid not to understand that. At places such as the LSE we are always grappling with the challenges that confront humanity at the moment. Perhaps I may spell out some of them: climate change, global economic functioning, social exclusion, health and well-being, international trading systems, unemployment, security, international development, race relations, conflict resolution, peacebuilding, human rights, financial risk and regulation, bioscience and societies, and public policy in general. These are the real issues facing humanity and this is where the social sciences will become absolutely indispensable if we are to find a successful solution.

Then of course, in a wider cross-section of universities, an important and growing contribution is being made to what I call professional calibre. I think of the courses being provided for the police, probation officers, social workers, youth workers, community workers and teachers. What is being recognised here—and there have been some extremely enlightened chief constables who have seen it very clearly—is that you need professionally well trained police but that you also need well educated police to make a success of policing in an increasingly complicated society. I am afraid—this is not in any way a criticism of the noble Lord, Lord Browne, and his report but a comment on the dangers inherent in the Government’s approach on funding—that we are going to see this qualitative work in the professions undermined because the universities will suffer from less funding; and because the bodies that have helped to finance, or in a sense commission, those courses will be forced to cut back on the higher education and university elements within the courses because of their reduced budgets. If the Minister can give me some attention for a moment, it seems to me that this is a crucial issue that deserves priority attention.

There is also the whole reality of the cuts and unimaginative targeting which will affect the entire approach to cross-subsidising studies. In much of the work to which I have referred, the matrix of studies is terribly important. From that standpoint, departments which are more expensive and more difficult to sustain have a crucial contribution to make. With this more targeted approach, what is going to happen to the cross-subsidising of courses? I suggest, as others have done, that universities are not places for market experiments. I think of the late Harold Macmillan talking about selling the family silver; and I think of the characteristics of a society that knows the price of everything and the value of nothing. All too easily, I can see cutthroat competition arising among universities, driving down quality and trying to attract students at rates which students will more easily be able to afford.

The Government repeatedly tell us that we are all in this together. If we are all in this together we need a strategy for higher education as a whole and we need a comprehensive approach which makes sense; we do not want to see one institution against another. Unashamedly, I hold to the old philosophy that what dignifies the term “university”, and any institution worthy of the name “university”, is the concept of a community of scholars—not an institution in the marketplace fighting to survive and fighting to attract students over other universities. In an ideal civilisation, universities as a whole should be a community of scholars and should not be at each other's throats, trying to ensure that they survive in the marketplace.

We all know that this country has been through a terrible economic crisis. When we think about it, we all know that the origins of that crisis lay very much in the realm of values and ethics. That is why, in our higher education system, we must be certain that we are not producing high-powered technologists, high-powered economists and the rest in a vacuum of ethics and philosophy. Surely, the more advanced and the more complex the challenges become, the more important those issues are for us all. Therefore, I hope, before the Government rush in to any solution, that they become very clear about what it is we are really trying to do.