Higher Education and Research Bill

Lord Lucas Excerpts

Report: 1st sitting: House of Lords
Monday 6th March 2017 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Bakewell]

I wish to support the amendment for its reference to,

“including those with experience of part-time, adult and distance learning”.

I support it in the light of the changing demographics, which are probably more extreme than people realise in this country. We can now expect anyone born today to have a very high chance of living to be 100, and certainly to 90. The fall-out of this on the economy and on how society is organised will be profound, and we need to be ready for it. Against that background, I suggest that part-time education, with opportunities to restructure your life and have secondary, portfolio careers—possibly several, within the century of a lifetime—is really important, and should be taken on board throughout this Bill, which serves very much the existing demographic.

[Lord Lucas (Con)]

My Lords, I talked about this general area in Committee, but I have tabled Amendment 97 because since then I have received a fundraising letter from the development office at Oxford, which included the words: “All the evidence points to the provision of bursaries and scholarships being one of the most effective and sustainable investments we can make”. This is an outright lie. Oxford knows, as will anyone who has investigated the subject, that as far as we know bursaries and scholarships have zero effect on improving the lives of students, and OFFA will confirm this. There are many more effective ways, including a wonderful summer school run by Oxford which has demonstrably very strong effects.

I wrote back, protesting this departure from the truth and Oxford wrote back to me to confess, without admitting that it had been lying. It said that at Oxford there were no differences in retention or attainment for bursary holders, compared with those for higher-income groups. It went on to say that there were possibly some effects but that, “This hypothesis cannot be rigorously tested without creating control groups which, as OFFA recognises, would be unethical”. So Oxford is denying not only truth but also randomised controlled trials as a means of establishing the truth. This is quite astonishing. Is the development office run on entirely different ethical grounds from the rest of the university? I have been corresponding with the professor in charge, but there does not seem to be any recognition that truth or science come into the mission which Oxford should be following.

I have a general concern about all that is happening under the access schemes. I have seen several examples of universities applying for money to support what they are doing where there has not been adequate research or evaluation. At the end of the day, the main flood of money into this scheme comes from students: it is students who are funding this. Universities ought to owe them an absolute duty to be doing the very best they can to make good use of this money. At the moment, they do not collaborate or evaluate in the way that they should, and I would like the Office for Students to have the power to change that.

[Baroness Blackstone]

My Lords, I strongly support Amendment 2, tabled by the noble Baroness, Lady Garden of Frognal, and supported by my noble friend Lady Bakewell, whose salient arguments I endorse but will not repeat.

I turn to Amendment 87 in my name. At Second Reading, I mentioned how important it is to ensure that the Director of Fair Access and Participation has the independence and autonomy required to do the job effectively. Although various interventions have helped to improve the proportion of university entrants from disadvantaged groups, the gap is still far too great between them and their more advantaged peers. Eighteen year-olds from the most advantaged areas are more than two and a half times more likely to enter higher education than those from poor neighbourhoods. Put another way, fewer than one in five young people from lower income backgrounds go to university, compared with three in five from the most advantaged areas. Recent figures show that around 20% of people from low-income groups go to university, compared with 47% of all people aged between 17 and 30.

I appreciate that the Government have pledged to increase the proportion of students from disadvantaged backgrounds and are determined to improve social mobility. I do not just appreciate it; I congratulate the Government on taking this position. I know that the Minister for Higher Education is aware and is concerned about the fact that there is also a very uneven distribution of students from poor families across different universities. The most socially privileged students are nearly seven times more likely to go to universities with high entry requirements. Put another way, only 3% of disadvantaged young people go to the more selective one-third of universities, compared with 21% of those from the richest neighbourhoods. The gap is even higher in the 13 most selective universities. That is enough statistics. They mean that people from lower-income backgrounds are seriously underrepresented in the more selective universities which have the most prestige and provide the easiest routes into high-status and highly paid jobs. As long as this goes on, attempts to increase social mobility will be jeopardised.

The role of the Director of Fair Access, therefore, needs to be given as much strength as possible to achieve the changes needed. The director will be helped by new duties to publish applications, offers and acceptance and progression rates, broken down by ethnicity, disadvantage and gender. Greater transparency, leading to more information about the performance of HEIs, will be a great help, but alone it is not enough.

I can see the business case for incorporating the Office for Fair Access into what is currently called the new Office for Students—although we hope that name might change. It makes sense on efficiency grounds, but it diminishes the independence of the Director of Fair Access. In future, he or she will have to report through the head of the Office for Students, a body that universities will fund and which may therefore be less inclined to challenge HEIs generally, and powerful individual universities in particular, on issues of access. There is a risk then that he or she may be overruled on important issues relating to access. I understand that the Sutton Trust has had some assurances that this is not the intention. To be sure that this does not occur, however, a simple safeguard could be introduced by amending the Bill to require the Director of Fair Access and Participation to report annually to Parliament on the performance of the Office for Students. This would strengthen the role, maintaining both independence and accountability, so I hope the Minister, when he replies, will accept the amendment.

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[The Earl of Dundee (Con)]

My Lords, as my noble and learned friend Lord Mackay of Clashfern has just implied, in performing its functions clearly the OfS should not just have regard to current and known needs as they may now be identified. It should also have regard to such needs as may come to light later on. By referring to the latter as “emerging needs” my noble and learned friend has produced a useful amendment, which I hope will be adopted.

[Lord Lucas]

My Lords, I congratulate my noble friend Lord Younger on the amendments that he has put his name to. They represent a great step forward and a real example of how a Government can listen and react constructively. I am grateful to him for his Amendment 6, which covers some areas that I referred to.

Perhaps I may question my noble friend on proposed new subsection (7)(c) in Amendment 11. I am puzzled as to why the “freedom” in this subsection is restricted to only these activities. In particular, there are occasions when the received wisdom within universities is rather different to that outside universities. I am not clear which this wording refers to, nor why there should not be a freedom to advocate popular opinions. I know that this has been a matter of controversy within universities from time to time, when people are referred to as popularisers of science in a derogatory way. Again, that should not result in discrimination or losing jobs and privileges. I will also refer to my two amendments in this group, which are linked with the Government’s Amendment 6.

--- Later in debate ---

I return to the lead amendment in this group, on institutional autonomy. Together with the related amendments tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Kerslake, it represents the most robust protection for institutional autonomy that has ever existed in our modern higher education system, and I am delighted to support its inclusion in the Bill.

[Lord Lucas]

My Lords, before my noble friend sits down, if he cannot reply now, will he reply by letter to the question I asked on Amendment 11?

[Viscount Younger of Leckie]

Yes, I certainly pledge to do that.

--- Later in debate ---

[Viscount Younger of Leckie]

My Lords, I shall speak first to the amendments on the transparency condition, then turn to those regarding student transfer. I have reflected on the arguments put forward in Committee, and we are clear that the transparency duty must remain focused on equality of opportunity through widening participation. I noted in Committee that the noble and learned Lord, Lord Wallace, and my noble friend Lord Lucas raised an important point on including attainment in the existing requirements to provide application, offer, acceptance and completion data. The evidence shows that there is more to do to close the attainment gap, which is particularly pronounced for certain groups of BME students.

We agree with noble Lords that attainment is an area that should be addressed and I thank them for their attention on this matter. That is why our Amendment 14 will add degree attainment at the end of the undergraduate’s course to the existing information required under the transparency condition. This will enable us to look across the whole student lifecycle, from application to graduation. I will now ask my noble friend Lord Lucas and the noble and learned Lord, Lord Wallace, to speak to their amendments, and I will then respond.

[Lord Lucas]

My Lords, I will speak to Amendments 15 and 17. Amendment 15 would give the Secretary of State a general power to add requirements. My principal concern with this bit of the Bill is that we have not really understood how much information UCAS has which it has not let out for the benefit of students and how many ways there are in which that information might be used to improve the quality of student decision-making. We will find this out, as time goes on, and I would like the Government to have the ability to respond to it. I am grateful for the changes which the Government have made in the Bill, particularly those to research using UCAS information, and we will certainly make some progress in this direction. However, I would be delighted if the Government felt able to give themselves the additional freedoms contained in Amendment 15.

Turning to Amendment 17, I want to be sure that all this information, which is being published by universities and made publishable by the Office for Students, actually reaches students who are in the process of making a decision. In the monopoly system in which we live, this effectively means that it must be provided—and easily accessed—through the UCAS system. Without this amendment, I cannot see where the Bill gives the OfS or any other part of Government the ability to direct that this information should reach students when they need it, rather than just being published and stuck away in some obscure place on universities’ websites, as is a lot of interesting information such as, in some cases, what the courses actually teach. There is a long practice of not making vital information easy to find. I would like the Government to have the ability to make sure that it was there when students ought to have it.

[The Earl of Dundee]

My Lords, as has been indicated, Clause 10 identifies and prescribes certain mandatory transparency conditions. However, in Amendment 15, my noble friend Lord Lucas manages to propose a wider and more useful scope. The new words drafted by his amendment provide greater flexibility and enable the Secretary of State to assist better and more thorough transparency. I hope the amendment will be accepted.