Higher Education and Research Bill

Lord Lucas Excerpts

Committee: 2nd sitting (Hansard - continued): House of Lords
Wednesday 11th January 2017 Lords Chamber

Clause 2: General duties

[Lord Lucas (Con)]

My Lords, I have a couple of amendments in this group. Perhaps I may start by speaking to Amendment 34. I have great hopes for it. My noble friend earlier enjoined us to be broad in what we put into this part of the Bill and not to be too bogged down in detail. I do not think that we can get much broader than the public interest, but it would be an important addition to this part of the Bill.

There are some very important things which will not get done under the current wording. One of them is consideration of what sort of system is wanted and what demand is out there. What do students want to see happening? What do those who recruit students when they graduate want to see happening? What pattern of provision is emerging? What strategy should be pursued to develop the higher education system which the country as a whole wants and needs? This is really important, and one can see that the current system does not function or at least functions extremely slowly. I shall give noble Lords a couple of examples.

The American university system is based largely on the liberal arts model. That has been very slow to come into this country, although our best students are flooding across to study it in America because it is the only place they can find it. A lot of good students want to stay abroad and to use universities to explore new subjects. We tend to take the view that you go to a university to study history or physics, and that is what you should stick to, but that is not what we all need afterwards. I studied physics; I could jolly well have done with a bit of essay-writing to go with it, not to say public speaking and maybe a bit of business. It would have done a great deal of good, because how many physics students go on to be physicists? It is not that many. But we have admission arrangements that pay no attention to breadth in the way that American universities do. There is clearly a great demand among students for good courses in the liberal arts style. That demand is not being responded to with any sense of rapidity by the established university system. Being universities, they all have the breadth of teaching ability and subject spread which would enable them to offer such courses if they chose to do so, but there is no pressure in that way.

The other example is acceptance of BTECs. It is noticeable how difficult it is to predict whether a university will accept a BTEC for its courses. For example, Durham has a very prestigious business course which accepts BTECs, but the course in Exeter does not. Why? Is this the pattern of response that we want in our education system as a whole? We agree that we do not want to tell individual universities what to do, but perhaps the conclusion is that we want more good courses open to BTECs. There seems to be nothing in the Bill which allows the OfS to consider such matters, and there should be.

My second amendment in this group is Amendment 47. The simplest thing would be for me to wait for an answer on that from Minister, rather than my taking up time telling him things about it when I want to listen to what he has to say.

[The Lord Bishop of Birmingham]

My Lords, I regret that my friend the Bishop of Portsmouth is not in his place tonight, having been exhausted, I suppose, by leading the debate on the Armed Forces covenant on Monday. He has asked me to bring before your Lordships Amendment 58 which relates to the general duties of the Office for Students. This is in the context of warmly welcoming the Bill’s commitment to greater diversity and improved choices for students, both in the wider choice of the number of institutions and in course and subject. However, we believe it is vital also to have a variety of institution types with distinctive characteristics. There are many universities with a particularly distinctive character: for example, the cathedrals group of universities, and others such as Goldsmiths, which has a focus on creative studies. It is this fact that the amendment seeks to recognise and pay heed to.

Your Lordships may know that there are more than 100,000 students enrolled across the 16 cathedrals group institutions. Collectively, undergraduates, post- graduates and research students are making the cathedrals group about the same size as the university sector in Wales. We do not for a moment wish to press this amendment to a Division, but we hope that the Minister and his officials will be willing to look afresh at the inclusion of and provision for universities with a distinctive character.

--- Later in debate ---

[Baroness Brown of Cambridge (CB)]

My Lords, I shall speak to a couple of issues. First, although I generally support the reasons behind the amendments in this group, I have to express some concern about what I infer from the comments of the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, who was speaking about the role that the OfS might play in encouraging universities to take students with different qualifications. Until recently I was vice-chancellor of Aston University, which has the outstanding Aston Business School, which does indeed take students with BTECs. However, our experience at Aston Business School was that these were the students who were least likely to succeed in that course. They had the highest rate of third-class degrees and failures. They had real problems with the mathematical elements of the economics in the business degree, such that we put on a lot of additional teaching to try to assist them through it. It is very important that universities are allowed to set their own admissions criteria because their curricula will require different things of the students who attend. It is important to indicate to students what is going to be needed to get through those courses.

I therefore have a lot of sympathy with Exeter over not taking students with BTECs for the curriculum that it teaches. Aston and, I think, Durham are able to, but I am sure that they do so by providing additional help. I encourage the Minister to stick to what Clause 2(4) says—that the guidance from the Secretary of State must not relate to the criteria for the admission of students or how those criteria are applied—because that is hugely important to the autonomy and independence of our universities.

[Lord Lucas]

I entirely agree with the noble Baroness: it absolutely is not interference with an individual university; it is looking at the system as a whole and saying, “We need to do something about providing better courses for people coming out of school with BTECs”, if we have decided that BTECs are what schools are providing. BTECs are just being upgraded to address some of the problems, and I hope that works, because clearly there are problems with the old syllabus. Universities have to take their own decisions but the OfS surely ought to be looking at the system as a whole and changing the provision somewhere, because the system as a whole is not meeting people’s needs.

[Baroness Brown of Cambridge]

I thank the noble Lord for that clarification, which I strongly support.

I shall speak briefly to Amendment 56, in my name and that of my noble friend Lady Wolf. The Office for Students is tasked with promoting quality. Promoting quality seems a modest ask, and we feel that the Office for Students should be given a more dynamic and assertive challenge—not just to see that a particular objective or standard has been reached, but to be active in ensuring that quality is delivered in an environment of continuous improvement. We urge the Minister to consider some more active wording about the need to secure and improve the overall strength and quality of higher education provision in England, with a stress not just on ensuring quality but continuing to improve it.