Technical and Further Education Bill

Lord Lucas Excerpts

Report stage (Hansard): House of Lords
Monday 27th March 2017 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Morris of Yardley (Lab)]

My Lords, I support these amendments. They are very reasonable and it is difficult to find too many reasons for opposing them other than bureaucracy. When you weigh it up, the argument comes down very much on the side of the amendments on this occasion and not on the side of bureaucracy.

This is primarily about delivering good-quality apprenticeships for young people and adults. We all know that one of the challenges is to change the public discourse about apprenticeships and vocational training, and we are going to have to work really hard if that is to happen. When I look back at the reforms in schools over the past two decades, one of the changes that enabled us to have a more effective public discourse and empower people to ask the right questions, both for members of their own family and in general, was the availability of data. I hear good-quality conversations now from parents, teachers and young people about education, and that is because they have the information to ask the questions and have the debate.

However, I do not think it is there with apprenticeships and technical education. We do not have it yet, and we have a responsibility, if this system is to work, to build up the data and language so that the public can have a proper conversation and monitor what is going on with apprenticeships. Certainly in the medium term, this amendment would help deliver that. It would put information in the public domain every year, and in time, if not immediately, that would lead to discussion and debate. That has to be good for raising the profile of this area of education as well as holding the institute to account for what it is delivering.

I accept that entirely, but also want to emphasise a different point. Has the Minister wondered whether this does not in some way reflect the annual HMCI report, which is laid before Parliament and on which there is always a public debate? It gets on the “Today” programme, bits of information get into the newspapers and the media, and it becomes part of the national conversation that we have about schools. So having this information in the public domain is the right thing to do for accountability. But it would also help with the cultural change that we have to bring about to have a public debate about this area of education. This is not unreasonable. I can see that in years to come—say, in five years’ time—we might want to review the minutiae and the details. I do not think we ought to be committed to this for ever and a day, but I cannot see that the value of starting the practice of having an annual report, monitoring progress and building up confidence and awareness, would be outweighed by any bureaucratic burden that it might place on organisations.

[Lord Lucas (Con)]

My Lords, I entirely agree with what the noble Baroness, Lady Morris of Yardley, has just said. As the House knows, I run the Good Schools Guide. We do what we can to spread information about apprenticeships, but that is extremely difficult because the amount of information available is not good. For universities, by comparison, there is one single source of information. Now, I do not wish the Government to hire UCAS to do apprenticeships, because UCAS is an extremely difficult organisation to deal with and does not let data out to anyone, but something like it which was a single point of information would really help schoolkids and schools because ordinary teachers, let alone career teachers, do not have time to learn their way around 150 different university apprenticeships, let alone all the others. They need a coherent source of information. There is a habit among employers of letting information out only in the two weeks when they want to hire apprentices, rather than all around the year when potential apprentices want to be looking. They are not adjusted to that kind of marketing yet; they are recruiting in penny numbers rather than the tens of thousands, as universities are. There are all sorts of reasons why we need more information and support.

If you want to know where children have gone on to from school, schools will give you—at least English schools will; Scottish schools are more tiresome—a long list of university courses that their students have got on to. Nowhere can you find those data for apprenticeships. You can get data from the Higher Education Statistics Agency so you can publish information from there if you want, but there is no equivalent available for apprenticeships. That makes the whole business of upping the status of apprenticeships, and of technical education generally, much harder than it needs to be. So while I hold no brief for the exact drafting of the two Labour amendments, I am very much with the spirit of them.

On the amendment that followed from the noble Baroness, Lady Garden, there is scope for upping the prestige of the Institute for Apprenticeships in this way. It gives it that much more visibility in public, that much more right to comment and that much more right to be heard. At a time when there is going to be a lot of change, a lot of difficult decisions taken and a lot of need for what is going on to be in the public eye so that things that are not quite right get caught early and commented on early rather than being relegated to the pages of a few specialist magazines, an increase in prestige, as suggested in this amendment, is an excellent idea.

[Lord Baker of Dorking (Con)]

My Lords, we have not had very much information about what the annual statement from the Institute for Apprenticeships will be. As the institute is a quango, it will certainly produce an annual report—there is no question about that—and it is the usual practice of such reports to be debated in one way or another in the House. So we should accept that as a given, as it were.

As to the content of the report, I am encouraged by the fact that the quality of the directors will mean that it is not going to be a soft quango at all; it will be a very tough and well-informed one because they will be very aware of the fact that it is a great new departure in the education system to concentrate on apprentices, and they will want to ensure that the apprentice system that the country develops will be effective for both employers and students. So I expect the Institute for Apprenticeships to take an interest in nearly all the points mentioned in paragraph 1.

Whether that is needed in the Bill, I very much doubt. The best way to do it would probably be for the Secretary of State to formally write a letter to the chief executive of the institute when one is appointed, which I hope will be soon, indicating the range of information that the report should contain. That might be the best way out of it because the nature of the information will change over the years and you do not necessarily want to keep amending this part of the Bill. There are all sorts of other interesting things that the report should contain. I think the time has come for the Minister to make clearer what he thinks will be in the report. If he cannot do so today, perhaps he might be able to before Third Reading.

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[Lord Watson of Invergowrie]

My Lords, I thank my noble friend Lord Young of Norwood Green for submitting these amendments. I have added my name to Amendment 4. I do not think there is a great deal to add to what he has said, but some of this impacts on the arguments that I advanced on the previous group of amendments. It is about accessibility of information and careers advice on apprenticeships. It is also about the institute being seen as an open and accessible organisation. I think we all agree that we want it to meet its aims and to do so as successfully and quickly as possible. Asking it to provide information and to report to Parliament is not radical; it is about building the sort of confidence that I referred to on the previous group of amendments.

Monitoring how many small and medium-sized enterprises employ apprentices is also important because those employers will be key to the Government reaching their target of 3 million starts by 2020. Quite possibly this will be included in the list of categories mentioned by the Minister in his response to me on the last group of amendments, and perhaps he could say something about that in his reply. To some extent, SMEs have been the elephant in the room: they have not been referred to in our consideration of the Bill to anything like the extent they should have. They will play a very important part in apprenticeships—in small numbers, inevitably, and company by company—but overall they will make an important contribution.

I agree it is important that not just the number of apprenticeship starts but, as my noble friend Lord Young said, the number of employers taking on apprentices are listed. If those figures are not collected, how can the network being established by the institute be measured? The kind of information that I refer to will surely be collected, so I ask the Minister: why would the institute not make it publicly available and do so willingly?

I would like to add to what my noble friend Lord Young said by mentioning the apprentice contract and, to some extent, its status. He talked about complaints and the need for a helpline when apprentices need to pass on their concern about the quality of the apprenticeship being offered. There is no regulator in this sector and I ask the Minister whether the apprenticeship contract will be subject to the Consumer Rights Act 2015. The contract will be fully entered into by both parties, and that Act will play a part in the higher education sector as a result of the Bill before your Lordships’ House. A preliminary investigation led to universities being required for the first time to produce information on the cost of courses and so on, and that would be helpful. If the Minister cannot reply immediately, I shall be quite happy to receive a letter on the status of the apprentice contract and whether it will be subject to the Consumer Rights Act 2015.

[Lord Lucas]

My Lords, I would certainly like an apprentice who is having a hard time getting what they want or a proper education, particularly in an SME, to be able to communicate that, and unless there is an established route for them to do so, as described in the amendment of the noble Lord, Lord Young of Norwood Green, it will be very difficult to ask someone to invent one. There needs to be someone the apprentice can talk to first; otherwise, it will be just too difficult and we will never get to know the quality of the apprenticeship. Anything that became a regular reporting mechanism might well take up a lot of time but not produce any good. However, something should be in place so that, when things are really going wrong, the person at the wrong end of that can have a voice. It seems to me that that is worth including.

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[Baroness Vere of Norbiton]

Unfortunately, I am unable to clarify that at the moment, but I will write to the noble Lord. I will also unfortunately have to write to the noble Lord, Lord Watson, on his point about the Consumer Rights Act.

As a requirement of the Skills Funding Agency funding rules, the training provider must ensure that a commitment statement and the apprenticeship agreement are in place before funding is released, which implies that these things are happening—otherwise, funding would not be released—but I will confirm that. This is monitored by the SFA, and duplication by the institute is therefore not necessary. I hope that noble Lords will feel reassured enough on the basis of my explanation not to press these amendments.

[Lord Lucas]

Can my noble friend say whether the apprenticeship documents that an apprentice receives include the telephone number of the helpline?

[Baroness Vere of Norbiton]

Again, I am unable to confirm that, but I will write to my noble friend. If not, I think perhaps it should.

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[Baroness Garden of Frognal]

My Lords, Amendment 6 is in my name and that of my noble friend Lord Storey. I will also speak to Amendment 28, which is in my name and supported by the noble Lords, Lord Lucas and Lord Watson of Invergowrie, and my noble friend Lord Storey.

I make no apology for bringing back Amendment 6. It is very simple. As we discussed in Committee, it would cost no money but would make a great difference. Craft and creative skills, personal services such as care or hairdressing, and professional skills such as business or accounting are not automatically seen as primarily technical. I accept that there has been a move away from the long-standing term “vocational” to cover non-academic qualifications and that the decision seems to have been taken that “technical” is the word of the moment, particularly now as we seem out of the blue to have T-levels—as the noble Lord, Lord Young explained. It would be interesting to know what consultation went on before the arrival on the scene of T-levels from the Chancellor of the Exchequer. In order not to narrow the Bill to purely mechanical technical subjects, an explanatory clause would be a helpful addition and ensure that this legislation is seen to be inclusive of all work-based qualifications and across the range of courses offered in further education.

Arts subjects should be held in the same esteem as other courses. It is of great concern to hear that creativity and the arts are being squeezed out in schools. Between 2003 and 2013, there was a 50% drop in GCSE entries for design and technology, 23% for drama and 25% for other craft-related subjects. It stands to reason that this will have a knock-on effect on the take-up of further education courses in creative subjects. We would like to ensure through this amendment that there is no doubt that the attempts to improve technical education, as outlined in the Bill, apply equally across all courses.

Amendment 28 is for clarification. As we discussed in Committee and as the noble Lord, Lord Young, set out, we would like to clarify the transition process between these schemes. There is already a comprehensive list of approved technical education qualifications in the Ofqual regulated qualifications framework. We seek to clarify the relationship between that framework and the list in the Bill. It would certainly introduce complexity and confusion to have multiple qualification lists. Can the Minister clarify that the institute’s list will be a transfer from rather than in addition to the Ofqual list? If so, what systems will be set up to ensure that the transition and transfers are as straightforward as possible? Does the Minister envisage any major differences between these two lists? I look forward to his reply and beg to move.

[Lord Lucas]

My Lords, I add my support to the amendments in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Garden. If I remember rightly, in Committee the noble Baroness, Lady Cohen of Pimlico, asked whether the word “professional” might be added to “technical” in the Bill to provide a broader and more prestigious view of what was covered. I think “professional” has a lot of attractions to it in bridging the divide between academic and vocational qualifications. “Technical” gets some of the way but not all the way. I thought it was a good suggestion. The Minister said that he would take it away and think about it. I am sorry if I have missed the results of those deliberations in the letters that have been sent out. But if I have not missed them and we have not had them, could we have them now, please?

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Moved by

[Lord Lucas]

8: Clause 2, page 2, line 14, after “providers” insert “, or persons acting on behalf of a number of such providers,”

[Lord Lucas]

My Lords, I shall speak also to Amendment 9. These amendments are very simple. They pick up on my noble friend Lord Baker’s excellent amendment, which was accepted in Committee, to point out that it is not just the local FE college or other major provider that wants to get into schools. There are a lot of excellent organisations which need to get into schools. Women in Construction is one. In needs to get the message through that there are a lot of very good jobs for women in construction. There are similar efforts going on about women in engineering and women in computing. They are not education providers. They have been funded by education providers and employers to produce a flow of students to education providers in general. Those organisations need to get into schools just as much as individual providers, if not more, because in many cases they have a level of prestige and glamour which the local FE college lacks. I beg to move.

[Lord Storey]

Amendment 17 is in my name and those of the noble Lord, Lord Watson, and my noble friend Lady Garden. I moved a similar amendment in Committee, when I talked about “good” or “outstanding” FE colleges being awarded either status only if their careers education was of a high standard. The noble Baroness, Lady Morris, spoke in a sort of roundabout way about the importance of careers education, but was concerned about straitjacketing through the use of “outstanding” and “good”. Having reflected on what she said, I have come back with a slightly changed amendment, which highlights the importance of careers education in further education and says that when Ofsted carries out inspections, it is important that the careers guidance in those establishments be of a high calibre.

One of the most important things that we need to do for young people is to provide that guidance and knowledge about careers. Many of us do it with our own children: if careers advice is not available, we have networks of people who can talk to our children and perhaps provide opportunities for them to do work experience. But many children and young people, particularly those from disadvantaged backgrounds, do not get that network of support, and it must be down to the education system to provide that. Careers education should start in primary school. I remember that at my own school we had a careers session, where people from different jobs and workplaces would come into the school. There would be a carousel approach, and children could listen to them. That should go through to secondary schools, so I was delighted that the Government accepted the amendment from the noble Lord, Lord Baker, on university technical colleges being able to come into schools. They will be able to go into schools and tell young people about the different opportunities. We do not want a straitjacketing approach but one which lets young people see all the different possibilities. We have talked about this for a long time and have heard all sorts of promises about what will happen down the road. The situation is getting slightly better, but surely, if we are going to do one thing, the most important thing we can do for young people is to get careers education right.

I was interested in what the noble Lord, Lord Young, said on Amendment 4. Careers education is not just about careers advice and guidance, as important as those are, but about preparation for a career. If a young person has a career opportunity, I would have hoped that the educational establishment would prepare them for that, whether through techniques for interviews, filling out an application or preparing a CV—all those things come together in good careers advice. I hope the Government will listen to this, as I am sure they will, and that we can agree that careers advice should be part of the establishment of good FE providers.

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[Lord Nash]

My Lords, I thank noble Lords for tabling the amendments, which relate to careers. I have to say I am still struggling with the concept of the noble Lord, Lord Watson, being the meat in anyone’s sandwich. He is a pretty tough piece of meat, based on my experience of sitting opposite him at the Dispatch Box. That is meant as a compliment, actually.

On Amendment 8, tabled by my noble friend Lord Lucas, Clause 2 requires schools to ensure that there is an opportunity for a range of education and training providers to talk directly to pupils about the technical education qualifications and apprenticeships that they offer. The amendment is intended to ensure that such access is extended to people who represent groups of providers, such as women in construction or manufacturing. I remember attending an event held for women in manufacturing in your Lordships’ House a few years ago. I agree that we need a degree of flexibility so that pupils hear from the person best placed to inform them about the opportunities on offer. I recognise that in some cases that may not be the provider itself but perhaps it could be an ambassador, an employer or a member of a trade association or representative body, speaking on behalf of a number of small providers.

We will publish statutory guidance that will set out more detail and make it clear that we do not wish to impose unnecessary constraints. We are placing the onus on the school to develop their own arrangements for provider access, including agreeing with providers who will attend to talk to pupils. Clause 2, both as drafted and as we intend to clarify in underpinning statutory guidance, already provides for persons acting on behalf of a number of providers to access pupils. To get really technical and legal for a moment, I queried this in terms of statutory interpretation. The legal authority for our decision to resist the amendments is found on page 1019 of Bennion on Statutory Interpretation:

“Where an enactment refers to a person it is usually taken as intended to include that person’s agent authorised either expressly or by implication”.


The earliest legal authority on this is R v Symington (1895) 4BCR 323. It follows that the words “on behalf of” in the statute would not be needed to allow a person to act on behalf of providers.

Turning to the very good point made by the noble Baroness, Lady Morris, regarding the amendment from my noble friend Lord Baker, it is certainly clear to me, and my officials have confirmed this, that the obligation on the school is to ensure that there is an opportunity for a range of education and training providers to access pupils, that they must prepare a policy statement and that that statement must include, for example, grounds for granting and refusing requests for access. Obviously it must be at the discretion of the head; if he feels that the people coming along are, frankly, not of quality and are not going to give their pupils the right advice, then it must be within the head’s remit to refuse access, provided that he is providing a range of education and training providers and has some other alternative that is better.

Amendment 9 is also in the name of my noble friend Lord Lucas. It is intended to ensure that the policy statement produced by every school will set out the circumstances in which both providers and persons acting on their behalf will be given access to pupils. The current provisions already allow for such persons to talk to pupils. As I said, we will publish statutory guidance which makes this degree of flexibility explicitly clear: the onus is on schools to liaise with providers to agree who is best placed to talk to them.

Turning to Amendment 17, which deals in more detail with Ofsted and careers advice, careers advice is a vital part of the role that every school and college must play in preparing students for the workplace. I agree entirely with the noble Lord, Lord Storey, that careers advice should start in primary school. Primary Futures does excellent work in this regard. I also agree with the noble Lord, Lord Aberdare, that the Careers & Enterprise Company, in which we are investing considerable money—£90 million—has made an excellent start.

However, the quality of the careers offer is considered carefully by Ofsted when conducting standard inspections of FE colleges. Therefore, the amendment is unnecessary. Matters relating to careers provision feature in all four graded judgements made by Ofsted inspectors. First, in judging leadership and management, inspectors take account of the extent to which learners receive thorough and impartial careers guidance to enable them to make informed choices about their current learning and future career plans. Secondly, in judging the quality of teaching, learning and assessment, inspectors consider how far learners are supported to develop their employability skills, including appropriate attitudes and behaviour for work. Thirdly, in judging students’ personal development, behaviour and welfare, inspectors consider how learners benefit from purposeful work-related learning, including external work experience. Finally, in judging outcomes, inspectors consider information about students’ destinations and the acquisition of the qualifications, skills and knowledge that will help them to progress.

Ofsted also evaluates the education and training provision offered by the college, including 16 to 19 study programmes, apprenticeships and traineeships. In making these judgments, inspectors consider the extent to which each type of provision offers tailored careers advice and work experience opportunities to students and develops their employability skills. Noble Lords made some good points about Ofsted’s approach to that, and I will certainly discuss that further with Ofsted shortly. However, I hope that what I have said about its obligation framework reassures my noble friend that colleges are held to account properly for the quality of their careers provision and that he will be able to withdraw the amendment.

[Lord Lucas]

My Lords, I am very grateful to my noble friend for his short CPD session, which I hope I shall manage to remember and will rehearse later in Hansard. Given that, I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.

Amendment 8 withdrawn.

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Moved by

[Lord Lucas]

22: Schedule 1, page 26, line 4, at end insert—
“( ) The group of persons that prepared a standard must have considered, including within the standard, a qualification widely recognised by employers for that occupation or for an aspect of it.”

[Lord Lucas]

There has been a problem with apprenticeships, at least historically, where people have wanted to include qualifications within them. I would be very grateful if my noble friend would make it clear that this has now passed and that the idea of including qualifications within apprenticeship qualifications, or indeed within qualifications at FE colleges, is now fully accepted. Generally, this is to the advantage of the learner. If I am doing a qualification within one of the 15 proposed Sainsbury routes, and that apprenticeship involves getting to know cybersecurity, I do not want to have a haberdasher’s qualification in cybersecurity: I want to have something which will be recognised in every single industry which might require that skill. The same applies to accountancy, marketing and other skills which are common across the routes, where these are things that you might wish an apprentice to learn in the course of their apprenticeship, or have experience of. It also applies particularly to technical qualifications in IT, where you would expect an apprentice to follow one or more international qualifications produced by the likes of Microsoft because that is what the industry as a whole demands and that is what produces a young person who can move from job to job because they have the qualifications that are recognised in their next job and not just those which are appropriate for the particular patch where they did their apprenticeship.

It is also important in this context that the specifications for apprenticeship should recognise that there are alternative qualifications in some circumstances. You may want your young person to be familiar with computer networking but there are two, maybe three, top-quality international qualifications in computer networking. Which one do you want to use? It will be the one that works with your business. However, the people in charge of the apprenticeship will recognise that these are equivalent and that either one can count and fit in place. I think this has been accepted now. There seems to be some residual difficulty reported to me. However, I would be very grateful for my noble friend’s assurance that the concept of embedding qualifications in apprenticeships or in further education courses is now fully accepted. I beg to move.

[Lord Baker of Dorking]

I support my noble friend’s amendment. I suspect that individual apprentices will work on the basis that he mentioned as certain qualifications in certain industries are not in the regular run of FE colleges, or universities for that matter, but have been accepted by the industry as the accepted standard. My noble friend mentioned Microsoft. Cisco does this as well. It is particularly the case in the whole area of computing, where various companies have established qualifications which have become the standard. In fact, the Cisco qualification for schools is more demanding than GCSE computing, and many people work towards that. We have to make sure that these qualifications do not disappear when the Institute for Apprenticeships clears out a lot of valueless qualifications. These are not valueless, particularly the international ones. Given that the digital revolution is happening so suddenly, a huge variety of examinations and qualifications in artificial intelligence may come our way. Each area will want to protect its own interest. I would hope that the Institute for Apprenticeships would take this message on board. I do not know whether a statutory measure is required.

[Lord Nash]

My Lords, I am grateful to my noble friend Lord Lucas for this amendment, the effect of which would be to require each group of persons who develop a standard to consider whether an existing qualification ought to be included within it. Occupational standards will form the basis of both apprenticeships and technical education qualifications, and need to be suitable for each of them. The standard should include the knowledge, skills and behaviours needed to form the basis of either an apprenticeship or a technical education qualification. Including existing qualifications in addition to the knowledge, skills and behaviours would cause complications when technical education qualifications are being developed using the standard.

One of the core principles of the apprenticeship reforms is to move away from qualifications. Under the framework model, apprentices collect a number of small, often low-quality, qualifications throughout their apprenticeship which often do not give employers much reassurance about apprentices’ ability to do the job. By moving to a single end-point assessment, the apprentice will be tested on the knowledge, skills and behaviours set out in the standard and their occupational competence to do the whole job, not just a small section of it.

This amendment does not require the inclusion of qualifications in standards but it is moving the approach back towards the system that we are moving away from. Although it is no doubt something that the awarding bodies would welcome, it could actively encourage employer groups to include qualifications where they may otherwise not have done so. That is likely to be contrary to the Government’s strategic guidance for the institute. However, I can reassure my noble friend and the House that in occupations where there is a qualification that is needed for an apprenticeship—for example, to achieve a professional status—they will not need to be prompted by this Bill to consider its inclusion in the standard, which is permissible as long as they meet set criteria for an exception. This is in line with the employer-led nature of the reforms. We therefore believe that this kind of direction is not needed in such a system. I hope that my noble friend will feel reassured enough on the basis of my explanation to withdraw this amendment.

[Lord Lucas]

My Lords, I am mostly comforted by my noble friend’s reference to employer-led matters. If that indicates that if employers want a qualification and fight hard enough they will get it, that seems to me satisfactory. Therefore, I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.

Amendment 22 withdrawn.

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[Baroness Garden of Frognal]

My Lords, I will also speak to Amendments 26 and 29 to 33, which are in my name and those of the noble Lords, Lord Lucas and Lord Watson, and my noble friend Lord Storey.

This series of amendments is intended to limit the institute’s ability to acquire wholesale the intellectual property relating to materials developed by awarding bodies. We expressed serious concerns about this in Committee. This is a significant proposal, which was not canvassed in the skills plan. As drafted, it is unclear whether awarding organisations retain any copyright to potentially key documents relating to a qualification once ownership transfers to the IATE. It is further proposed in paragraph 23 of Schedule 1, proposed new Section A2IA—“Transfer of copyright relating to technical education qualifications”—that:

“The Institute may assign … or grant a licence to another person”,


in the copyright transferred to the institute. These are draconian proposals.

The arguments we have been offered include that the Government—that is, the taxpayer—will have paid the awarding body to develop the materials and are therefore entitled to ownership. Publishers often give advances to authors, but they do not thereafter claim copyright. The payment is for the skills and expertise; the contents should remain the property of the author organisation. Another reason given was that it would provide continuity. If awarding body A loses a contract to awarding body B, there could be a seamless transfer. This begs a few questions. If awarding body B has won the contract, how could it do so without providing its own materials, and what self-respecting awarding body would opt to take over a competitor’s materials? But what if awarding body A had gone bust? I find it sad and inexplicable that so much of the Bill presupposes that those involved with further and technical education are overly liable to go into insolvency. It is a pretty robust sector. Might it have gone into insolvency because the Government have taken over all its materials, one wonders? In any case, in the unlikely event that a key awarding body went into liquidation, I feel sure that measures could be taken to retrieve any materials which had not already been handed over lock, stock and barrel to the Government.

We have heard from City & Guilds and other awarding bodies that the provisions in the Bill on the ownership of intellectual property and qualifications are unclear. As many awarding organisations operate outside England and export their current qualifications overseas, this lack of clarity will have an impact on the development of qualifications. We note, as we did in Committee, that in both general academic studies and higher-level studies the Government do not attempt to own the copyright qualifications. We caution that this approach could have a disproportionate impact on the technical qualifications market in the UK.

We propose that institute-owned copyright is more appropriately applied at the level of national standards, allowing awarding organisations to retain their copyright in their own materials. The power of the institute is so uncertain that it makes it impossible to ascertain the value of investing in developing qualifications going forward. Further, it should be noted that there is no mention in the Sainsbury report, which was the progenitor of the skills plan, or in the skills plan, of the handing over of copyright to the institute in documents related to qualifications.

As to single awarding organisations, what evidence is there that the current awarding arrangement has led to distortions of the vocational market? As we pointed out in Committee, there is a certain inconsistency in government policy, which is going all out for more competition in universities—raising considerable concerns in this House—with a move to a monopolistic model for vocational awarding. The current mixed-market model may not be perfect but it supports and encourages investment and innovation, as well as giving choice and safeguarding learner interests in the event of any awarding organisation failure. A similar model was proposed for GCSE and English baccalaureate subjects, and was abandoned following robust evidence from the Education Select Committee and Ofqual. Why should these qualifications be treated differently? If a single-supplier franchising approach was deemed too high-risk for the general qualifications market, why should it be deemed suitable for technical qualifications? I wonder whether these restrictions might be connected with the fact that those in government—whether in Westminster or Whitehall—will predominantly have achieved their own success through academic routes. How many people in the DfE have followed an apprenticeship or a work-based route and understand first-hand just how relevant and rigorous those programmes are? The Civil Service used to have graduate and direct-entry routes, both of which could lead to the highest levels. These days, most will be graduates. It is therefore all the more important that those in government listen to the practitioners and heed their advice. I hope the Minister will be open to these important amendments, and I beg to move.

[Lord Lucas]

My Lords, I completely support the amendment in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Garden. I do not think that any Peer who has been involved in the Bill wishes it anything other than complete success. We are all behind the objectives and the methodology which is set out in the Sainsbury report and what has been built upon that. We want to ensure in the passage of the Bill that what we are producing will work well.

In the process of putting the Bill together, certain ideas have been developed which will not weather exposure to practice. When it comes to sitting down with industries, awarding bodies and others, the ideas that are being touted as the way things will be under the Bill will not be the things that work out. I want to make sure that the Bill has sufficient flexibility built into it so that, if things need to take a different turn to make this project succeed, they will be able to, and we will not find ourselves hobbled by primary legislation.

I have one separate amendment in this group that is aimed at the question of multiple qualifications within one particular sub-route—I do not yet know what they will be called; in the picture supplied to us they look like the fingers of a hand, although I do not think they will be called fingers. To restrict yourself to one single awarding organisation creates a monopoly in the short term, and in the long term it reinforces it. If you take one particular skill set within the universe covered by the Bill, and you say, “Only this awarding organisation can create qualifications for this for the next seven years”, what other awarding organisation will maintain the ability to compete? None of them will. Why should they? There is no business for seven years and they cannot afford to do it. It is all based on a collection of people, and anyway it is not something that stays still; it continuously evolves. There is no way that they will remain in a position to compete, so when you come up to the renewal of this single licence, there will be only one competitor.

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I hope that I have explained that the reforms to the skills system will succeed only if the institute retains copyright of relevant course documents. In making such significant changes to technical education, it is incumbent on us all to make sure that we prioritise the needs of employers and of students. There is, however, a great deal of flexibility within the Bill for the institute to make arrangements as it sees fit, and I firmly believe that we should trust it to make decisions that are for the good of the skills system. I therefore hope that my noble friend Lord Lucas and the noble Baroness, Lady Garden, will be sufficiently reassured not to press their amendments.

[Lord Lucas]

I am grateful for what my noble friend said on my amendments, but to turn to the main group, where she has adumbrated some new ideas in very few words, might we have a meeting between Report and Third Reading so that we can better understand the details of what is proposed?

[Baroness Garden of Frognal]

My Lords, I, too, thank the Minister for her full reply on all this, but I am left as confused as at the start. There is this curious thing that the institute can grant a licence back to the awarding body that actually created the materials in the first place or can give them to multiple awarding organisations. I find that a curious concept given that awarding organisations have to have a commercial structure and to make ends meet, and the materials with which they trade are very often their assessment materials. The Minister has made great play of the fact that there is flexibility in the Bill. But the trouble is that, by the time the Bill goes through with these measures enshrined that copyright is transferred to the institute, there is not much flexibility there if copyright is once lost to the institute.

There were a number of other things that I will read in detail in the Minister’s reply. I will not go through the different points that I have scribbled down because they merit a lot of thought. I also pick up the request made by the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, that we will need some serious conversations about this because it will come back at Third Reading for a vote unless we can get some clearer reassurance.

Immigration Skills Charge Regulations 2017

Lord Lucas Excerpts

Tuesday 21st March 2017 Grand Committee

[Lord Lucas (Con)]

My Lords, I welcome these regulations. They are well targeted, have a good concept, good execution, with a sensible set of exemptions and remission for small businesses. I am disappointed that they do not extend to hospitality and construction, both areas where we have a substantial tendency for employers to bring in people from overseas rather than concentrate on training our own people. However, I entirely understand, given that most of that migration is from the EU, why we do not wish to complicate our Brexit negotiations by trying this on the continent just yet. However, when you talk to hospitality employers, they say, “We have to employ these overseas people because the Brits just don’t know how to treat customers”. I say let us bring back the British Airways charm school, which is what I grew up with. We can do this; we just need to train people properly. I do not think that we should accept the excuses of our hospitality industry. We should apply this principle to it to get it to bring our own people up to speed.

However, within the industries this measure is aimed at, it is an excellent idea. It is largely, I think, aimed in practice at IT and industries round that. I would be very grateful if the Minister or his colleagues would agree to meet me and representatives of the tech industry to discuss how to craft training which will meet the needs of employers who are hit by this levy so that the incentive which is provided by it can be directed at the provision of training which will ensure that the objectives of the levy are realised.

[Baroness Hamwee (LD)]

We are all being so polite. Perhaps we have learned from the charm school with which the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, grew up. We, of course, support investment in skills and training but it is appropriate to put these proposals in the context of the very tight brief which the MAC, as always, was given. It was required to advise on,

“significantly reducing the level of economic migration from outside the EU”,

taking into account the impact on the economy, including on productivity and competitiveness, and was asked to consider five issues, of which a skills levy was one. As the Minister said, at the time of the review the Government had already signalled an intent to introduce the charge. It is fair to acknowledge the MAC endorsement of the proposal. It said in its review:

“We consider that the imposition of an ISC will serve to incentivise employers to reduce their reliance on employing migrant workers and to invest in training and upskilling UK workers”.


But I also observe that, certainly in the health sector, that gives the term “incentivise” a rather new meaning. The Explanatory Memorandum refers to a collapse in training. Will the Minister tell the Committee whether the Government have analysed why that has been the case?

The letter from the Minister, Robert Halfon, to the Secondary Legislation Scrutiny Committee confirms that this is a tax. We know that the Treasury hates hypothecation, but given its rationale it seems to us that those who are paying it must be able to see how it is used and, more than that, be involved in decisions about the application of the funds, because they know what normally works best in their own sectors. There must be a lot of sector-specific experience which should be tapped, as well as this being in the interest of transparency.

The Institute of Directors recognised that “penalising employers” who need to look to the “global talent pool” is,

“not the answer to gaining more home-grown talent”.

To balance that, PwC said:

“The levy will not impact the way that companies recruit as they require the skills they require”.


It raised the spectre of, in the long term,

“parts of businesses moving overseas, if mounting costs become prohibitive and companies risk damaging their brands by providing substandard products or services”.

I recall that during the passage of the Bill an argument used against this, partly in the higher education sector, was that some industries will pay the charge but would not see any benefits because their sectors are not apprenticeship-appropriate. That applied in particular to the health sector. I will leave it to my noble friend Lady Walmsley to deal in detail with the health sector. I know that I will support everything that she says.

During the passage of the Bill we also expressed concern about the costs of the bureaucracy of this exercise. Given the investment that the sectors in question already make in training, there seemed to be a danger of a charge being levied, having administration costs deducted and the balance then returned to them. I have been assured that the deduction will be small because the Home Office visa system will be used, but there will be a deduction. We can add to that the unquantified cost of the loading on to the Home Office, which is overloaded. It probably feels that the light at the end of the tunnel is that ever-present oncoming train.

The MAC also said that,

“it is impossible to conclude, ex ante, whether the benefit arising to employers … will outweigh the costs imposed on Tier 2 sponsors”,

because the Government have not yet determined how the revenue will be reinvested. That is clearly a significant point. It is clear that the health sector has come to a conclusion, and it is not the positive conclusion that the Government want to see. Robert Halfon, in his letter to the Secondary Legislation Scrutiny Committee, said:

“The cost to the healthcare sector and to the NHS in particular has not been estimated”.


That is quite an astonishing statement.

One other area is that of intercompany transfers. The Minister has referred to the exemption in the regulations, but the exemption is limited to trainees. Why is it so limited? Is it simply because they are trainees? That fits in with the thrust of the proposals. I ask that question and make the implied point because we need to do all that we can to attract, retain and not deter international companies basing themselves in the UK. I do not think that I need to fill in the gaps between the lines there.

There are steps that the Government can take after taking through these regulations, particularly by way of exemptions and by working with different sectors, which would make them more palatable to those who find them unpalatable, and more effective, and might help to avoid unintended consequences, as these charges are clearly going to be significant for some sectors.

Higher Education and Research Bill

Lord Lucas Excerpts

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

[Lord Lipsey (Lab)]

My Lords, I shall speak to Amendment 69 on the National Student Survey and Amendment 67 on postponing by a year the ability of TEF rankings to affect the fees universities can charge. Noble Lords will be relieved to hear that I will not repeat the longish and geekish speech I made in Committee on the National Student Survey. I look forward to hearing from the noble Lord, Lord Bew—a man whose expertise in this field no one in the House will doubt—putting the main arguments forward. However, the House ought to be updated on two recent developments that bear on the validity of the NSS.

First, there is the letter of 23 February from Ed Humpherson, the director-general for regulation at the UK Statistics Authority, to the DfE, responding to concerns raised with that authority on the NSS. It is a letter that needs a little reading between the lines, but in summary it refers approvingly to what Ministers have done to downgrade the NSS in the TEF. I will come back to that in a minute. It tells the department it must address the recommendations in the ONS report of June 2016 on the NSS and of the Royal Statistical Society in July 2016. Why do I draw attention to those two documents? They are the fundamental and official documents on which the critics of the NSS rest their case. They also take reading between the lines, but when this is done they are excoriating critiques.

Secondly, there is the question of benchmarking. Those reports and everyone who has addressed this subject agree that you cannot use the TEF for direct comparison between institutions. You simply cannot use it to compare the Royal College of Music and Trinity Laban—the two conservatoires that my noble friend Lord Winston and I have the honour of chairing—with Kingston University or any other I could mention. Instead, we are supposed to use benchmarking, which means comparing similar institutions.

Benchmarking raises its own set of statistical questions, which I will spare the House, so the Government decided that they needed an independent report on benchmarking and its statistical difficulties. What does that report say? It says nothing. Why does it say nothing? It is because it does not exist. Why does it not exist? It is because the Higher Education Statistics Agency, which admits this perfectly freely, has failed to commission it. It has been very difficult to get anyone to take it on. The pillar that bears the NSS in the TEF may be of solid oak, or it may be completely rotten. Without that study we have no idea.

The amendment I am speaking to calls for an inquiry into the NSS. I am delighted by all the concessions that the Government have made on the NSS in the TEF—although I should not call them “concessions”; they have given way to reason on these subjects—including its official downgrading to the least important metric, the admission of its shortcomings for small institutions, the one-year postponement of the subject TEF and the lessons-learned exercise. All those are sensible and welcome concessions from the Government. However, they mandate one further concession. It would be a self-inflicted blunder by the Government now to go ahead and let the TEF stop some universities’ raising fees on the original timetable until and unless that lessons-learned exercise has been completed and, indeed, the study that was supposed to have been commissioned by the Higher Education Statistics Agency has been commissioned.

We have been jumping in the dark into a pit whose depth we do not know. I want, and most noble Lords want, the TEF to work, but a rushed TEF, littered with statistical errors, will not work. If Ministers want the TEF to last—they do, and I do—they need a measured timetable for its introduction. They need to give it time to bed down. Otherwise, the flaws that I and others have been pointing to in this debate will turn from glints in the eyes of the geeks to real-world inadequacies and perhaps in some cases will even threaten the existence of the institutions that lose out as a result of those flaws. That would undermine the legitimacy of the whole scheme.

I beg the Minister, who has made so much progress with this Bill, not to concede, at the last minute, an own goal which may mean that what could have been a reasonable victory turns into a dreadful loss.

[Lord Lucas (Con)]

My Lords, I shall speak to my Amendment 68 in this group. I support very much what my noble friend the Duke of Wellington has said. I think he has an elegant approach in his amendment. Mine is different but we have the same concern. I am sure there are exceptions, but by and large this House wants the TEF to succeed. We want students to have more and better information on the quality and style of teaching than they have at the moment. We want universities and other higher education institutions to be motivated to improve the quality of their teaching.

We have some severe worries about the present quality of information, but let us set out and see what we can do over the next few years to improve it. After all, universities are supposed to be good at that sort of thing and, as we said, we have Chris Husbands in charge of the process. That gives me a good deal of hope and confidence. However, we cannot, on the basis of an unreformed, much criticised, hardly understood set of measures, leap into giving universities gold, silver and bronze metrics. If we give a university a bronze measure, the likelihood is that it will be struck off the list in those countries where students are centrally funded, such as the Gulf states. We will cause severe problems to students in countries where face is important, such as those in the Far East, who will have to say to their friends, “I am going to a bronze-rated university”. Bronze will be seen as failing because these universities will be marked out as the bottom 20%.

This is just not necessary. We have succeeded, in our research rankings, in producing a measure of sufficient detail and sophistication for people to read it in detail. It produces quite marked differences between institutions, but nobody reads it as a mark of a failing institution. It is information, not ranking, which is why I come back to my noble friend’s amendment as being a useful way of approaching this.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Lucas]

But is it not true that in the Government’s proposed system 20% of universities will always be in the bottom ranking? This is not a situation where the system can improve performance; it is a system that will always punish 20% of universities.

[Viscount Younger of Leckie]

I think that my noble friend is making an assumption that 20% represents bronze. The gold, silver and bronze system is a good thing and we should look at it positively. For example, if a new provider opens its doors, as it were, after three years and is already at the bronze level, with the opportunity to go up to silver and gold, surely that has to be a positive thing, and it is also something that students from here and abroad can look at.

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.

--- Later in debate ---

[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.

Technical and Further Education Bill

Lord Lucas Excerpts

Committee: 2nd sitting (Hansard): House of Lords
Monday 27th February 2017 Grand Committee

[Lord Hunt of Kings Heath (Lab)]

My Lords, at the heart of many of our debates so far there has been a desire to ensure that there is clear accountability for ensuring that at the end of the day we see the development of high-quality apprenticeships. Given the number of bodies involved and the complexity of the organisation and regulation of apprenticeships and technical education, I do not think there is any surprise that we see some ambiguity around this area. The question raised just now by the noble Baroness, Lady Garden, about the definition of an apprenticeship and how to change it showed some of the complexities that we are struggling with.

The Minister very kindly sent us a chart showing where current responsibilities lie. In summary, they seem to be as follows. The Education Funding Agency funds provision for pre-19 students. The Skills Funding Agency funds provision for students over 19, plus apprenticeships, and operates the apprenticeship service. Ofqual regulates the qualification and awarding bodies, including certain apprenticeships. The Institute for Apprenticeships determines the scope of technical education, sets the criteria and awards licences for the delivery of technical education qualifications; it approves and reviews standards and ensures they are upheld through contractual arrangements. Then there is Ofsted, which inspects the quality of training for level 2 and 3 apprenticeships. The information from the Minister is that HEFCE’s role in relation to levels 4 and 5 is still to be determined.

On any reading, that is a pretty complex picture. Is any one of those organisations responsible, in the end, for high-quality apprenticeships? Which of those bodies does the Minister hold ultimately accountable? For instance, which would be called in by the Education Select Committee, or, as I suspect, would they all be because no one is actually going to take ultimate responsibility?

What about the actions of employers? We know that some apprenticeships fail because of a lack of commitment from employers. My noble friend Lady Cohen described this very eloquently on our first day in Committee. What enforcement powers can be taken against employers who, for instance, undermine the apprenticeship schemes which their employees are on, for one reason or another? Ultimately, if the institute is the nearest we have got to an oversight body, does it have enough clout to ensure that it can influence all the other agencies involved? If the answer to the question is Ministers, what mechanisms do they have to give strategic direction and oversight? My noble friend doubted whether the noble Lord liked to bang heads together. I assume he does like to, but can he and how is it going to be done?

The amendment is a modest but, I hope, useful contribution to this. I have borrowed the concept from health legislation, where we are used to having a number of national bodies—either quangos, quasi-independent or to a certain extent independent—which are under a statutory duty to co-operate with each other. It might be useful to have a similar concept in relation to apprenticeships and technical education, given the diffusion of responsibility among many different organisations. The amendment is modest, but behind it lies the plea that, in the end, there is some organisation that can clearly be held to account for the quality of apprenticeships in future. At the moment, I have some doubts as to whether we can actually do that. I beg to move.

[Lord Lucas (Con)]

My Lords, I have a couple of questions to add to those of the noble Lord, Lord Hunt. It is important that a single organisation should keep a list of approved qualifications. At present, it is unclear whether this is going to be IFATE or Ofqual. I hope the Committee can have an answer to that. Secondly, I am unclear how far IFATE’s remit goes into the world of commercial qualifications: the sort of things where a commercial training provider will persuade an industry that this is a particular bit of training they should have for their staff; it has some sort of qualification name attached to it but is completely outside the government-funded system. Will IFATE have any influence in this area, or is it entirely outside its remit?

[Lord Young of Norwood Green]

My Lords, I will focus on just one area because, as I understand it, the various bodies set out in the amendment each have a different role. When we debated this on the first day in Committee, the Minister told us that the body that was going to look at the quality of apprenticeships was Ofsted and that it was going to work on a risk-based approach. I told him that I understood the approach but would welcome some clarification of how it is going to apply. He said that he would get back to us on that. As far as I am concerned, there are two things here. I support the thrust of the amendment, in that we need to be clear about the roles and responsibilities, but my overall concern is ensuring that we deliver quality apprenticeships so that the brand has a good reputation among teachers, potential apprentices and parents. If the Minister has replied to this point, I have not yet seen it. Is he in a position to tell us how this risk-based approach will apply to apprenticeships?

Given that we are looking to drive up the number of SMEs involved, the risk will not be with the larger organisations with well-established reputations, such as Rolls-Royce, BT, British Aerospace and a whole host of others that have been mentioned before. We know that people who go into those organisations will get a quality apprenticeship. That is not the problem. The problem will be in small and medium-sized concerns. Given that the success of this enterprise in driving up significantly the number of apprenticeships will depend on ensuring that we embrace more of those organisations in providing apprenticeships, a lot more than currently do, this is not an insignificant issue.

--- Later in debate ---

Moved by

[Lord Lucas]

17: Schedule 1, page 23, line 1, after “outcomes” insert “, including at least one recognised technical qualification,”

[Lord Lucas]

My Lords, I shall also speak to the other amendments in this group. I remind the Committee that I am associated with City & Guilds, which obviously has an interest in what happens under this part of the Bill. I will leave remarks on intellectual property, as far as I can, to the next group, which seems to focus on that subject.

As part of the Sainsbury review, we have a proposal that each of the 15 routes that it suggests should have a single awarding body allocated to it and that those awarding bodies should be subject to review every seven years. The Department for Education took a long time thinking about this structure in regard to GCSEs and decided against. It decided to keep the current three and a half, as it were, awarding bodies available for every subject and I think it did that for a very good reason. A single awarding body is a single point of failure. If it goes wrong, we are stuck.

--- Later in debate ---

[Baroness Wolf of Dulwich]

My Lords, I must rise to defend the position of the Sainsbury review, as I was a member of it and signed up to it, after a great deal of debate. No one in the group moved easily to the position where we recommended a single qualification for the college-based route—not, I should add, for all apprenticeships. Nothing in the Sainsbury review says that employers do not have a choice at that level. We did so for historical reasons and for comparative reasons. Historically, the model described by the noble Baroness served us quite well, but it is pretty much unique. Other countries have a single set of national qualifications. They do not have competing awarding bodies.

Historically, the Government set out consciously to destroy any near-monopoly in the vocational area. Back in the 1960s and 1970s, although there was no formal monopoly for City & Guilds, for example, none the less, construction awards were City & Guilds. If you wanted to train as a nursery nurse, you did NNEB. These were extremely well-known and well-respected qualifications. Since then, we have had repeated attempts to break that situation open and instil standardisation via standards. The result has unfortunately been in many cases a clear race to the bottom and, worse, the disappearance of any qualification which is clearly recognised and therefore has a brand and market value. This was, in a way, a slightly sadder but wiser recommendation.

When I wrote the vocational education review for 14 to 18 year-olds, I did not recommend a single awarding body. I hoped at that point that a regime within the Department for Education, which had clear standards for a qualification passing muster, would lead to a serious improvement in the quality of the vocational awards and the assessment, and the emergence of recognised market leaders. It really depresses me that that did not happen. We have a real problem at the moment: the old recognition has gone and the modified regime, which was brought in in the middle, does not seem to have done the trick. We have a gigantic number of qualifications on the books, many of them taken by tiny numbers of people, with no clear recognition at all. This area is by necessity very different from GCSE, where the Government really do not give awarding bodies much freedom any more. The degree of freedom which you have in the key areas of English or maths is pretty notional. The decision not to go ahead with the single awarding body was not because of a belief that we should not have one but because of Ofqual’s well-justified conclusion that it would not merely disorient the whole system but so destabilise it that we might have a national disaster.

There is a real issue in how the institute does its licensing, but it is not true that a body which holds a licence does so forever. Clearly, nothing will prevent the institute varying its regime in future years. However, I feel we are now in a situation where if we do not make a clear attempt to create a recognised, national qualification for each of these routes, people will not take them. They will feel that everybody knows what an A-level or a BTEC is, but we still have 15 of these things and do not know what any of them mean. So for once, unusually, I disagree with the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, and the noble Baroness, Lady Garden. The Sainsbury review was right to feel that a single licence for these classroom-based routes is what we have to do now, in 2017.

[Lord Lucas]

Yes, it is perfectly possible to do that but does the noble Baroness not think that we need a decent level of staff in IFATE in the middle of that? If she is saying that it will be the repository of this qualification and will maintain quality, integrity and innovation down through the years, can that be done on two and a half people, who seem to be all that are left to spare?

[Baroness Wolf of Dulwich]

I hope that with the licensing situation there will be a chunk of time when it is worth investing. There are issues relating to the licensing system, which we will get to later in the Committee, but we are not asking the institute to run the qualification. We are saying that there should be a licensed awarding body but that if the situation is not restored to where there is one clear, recognised qualification for a route, the qualification will have no brand recognition. The Government also tried repeatedly to kill off BTECs and they failed, because people value and need something that is known. In the current situation, we have created something of a desert with a few rather feeble weeds.

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[Baroness Buscombe]

I am sorry that the noble Lord seems to be taking quite a negative approach to this. As I said earlier, this Bill is for primary legislation to set a framework. Of course, there may be a situation where Ministers may have to have oversight, but the reality is that we want this to work as charged by the Sainsbury review. We are responding to a situation where we want to turn around something that has clearly not worked, and has clearly not been successful or provided the best outcomes for young people going into the world of work. We are trying to change that.

All I can say at this point is that we are happy to write to noble Lords to explain in more detail what we are trying to achieve through this process. As I said earlier, the legislation will not tie the hands of the institute. Flexibility and quality are key words in how this will develop.

[Lord Lucas]

My Lords, I am very grateful to my noble friend for her lengthy explanation. The main thing I would like to ask her is that, between Committee and Report, we have the chance to sit down and discuss this, as the noble Lord, Lord Hunt, says, with the people who are going to deliver this, as far as we can find them, so that we can get a real understanding of how this process is going to work.

I am delighted that my noble friend uses the word “flexibility”, but I cannot see how a seven-year provider four years into a contract is going to react when faced with an industry which says that it wants things changed because the technology or the requirements have moved on. The provider is going to ask, “How am I going to do this? It takes two years to change things and then I have a year to get my money back on this. What’s the game?”. I cannot see why, within the structure the Minister has described, two or three awarding organisations would be a problem; I can see why a single awarding organisation is a very deep problem in terms of the power transfer from government to the organisations.

I do not think that anybody who has spoken is opposed to the Government trying to make things better. We all have a sense of what is wrong with the current system, but we do not see that what is proposed answers that. That is not because the structure cannot answer it but because, to do the things that is asked of it, IFATE has to be a much stronger organisation. Alternatively, we need an arrangement, as we have with GCSEs, where below IFATE there is a layer or organisations that have a long-term commitment to and belief in improving things—they may be competing with each other but, essentially, they will work in partnership with IFATE and should expect to be there for the long term. That is better than a circulating body of people who are there and not there on a seven-year cycle, given that education cycles are so much longer. We would like to get an understanding of that and I very much hope my noble friend may be able to organise a meeting for us.

[Baroness Buscombe]

I am very happy to say that a meeting on the basis my noble friend suggests would be welcome between now and Report.

[Lord Lucas]

I am very grateful for that, and I am sure that other Members of the Committee would be delighted to come. I do not think there is any virtue then in continuing my peroration. I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.

Amendment 17 withdrawn.

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Amendment 24 is for clarification. As we have touched on already, qualifications currently feature in the Ofqual regulated qualifications framework. Will this list be separate and, if not, how will it relate to that framework? There are currently around 1,800 qualifications at levels 4 and 5 on Ofqual’s register of regulated qualifications. If the list proposed in Section A2HA is a replacement, there ought to be clear transitional arrangements in place now. If this list is parallel to the RQF, will this not add an additional level of complexity, rather than simplifying the system? Perhaps the Minister can clarify government thinking on this too.

[Lord Lucas]

My Lords, most of what I want to say has been said very well by the noble Baroness, Lady Garden. I have a couple of questions to add. First, some of the existing awarding organisations have quite substantial overseas businesses in the qualifications that they currently run. Is it the Government’s intention that these should be destroyed? I cannot see how they could be continued under the proposed IP arrangements. Secondly, how do the Government propose to deal with the incorporation into their regulated qualifications of qualifications whose IP they cannot hope to own, such as a CompTIA or Cisco qualification? In other words, if an apprenticeship can have four or five of these qualifications stuck in it like a currant bun—which is very much what employers want—presumably no transfer of intellectual property is involved. If this is the case for CompTIA, why should it not be the case for any existing awarding organisation?

[Baroness Whitaker (Lab)]

I remind noble Lords of my fellowship of the Working Men’s College. I support Amendment 20, not only for all the reasons so eloquently expressed by my noble friend but because it also offers a much more solid opportunity for young people from the Gypsy and Traveller communities to enter apprenticeships and to gain qualifications. These people have often dropped out of secondary school. A high proportion do so, for a variety of reasons. High among them are bullying and discrimination, and there is also a degree of alienation. However, these young people want to earn a living. They live in a work culture, an entrepreneurial one even. Their traditional trades—tarmacking, tree-lopping and scrap metal dealing—now need a high enough standard of literacy and numeracy to understand quite a lot of documentation, such as safety regulations and all sorts of papers. They do not often acquire these at school, so the implementation of this worthwhile amendment could result in many more such young people gaining a credential and raising their earning potential, so allowing them to join a society which, in the past, has tended not to be sympathetic.

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[Lord Lucas]

My Lords, I am feeling very disoriented here. A Conservative Government are arguing for nationalisation and against competition while I am arguing for more civil servants. This is not where I expected to be. My noble friend did not answer my question about external qualifications, such as Cisco or CompTIA, being embedded within apprenticeships or FE qualifications. Am I right in assuming that the Government are quite content under those circumstances to have no copyright whatever over those qualifications?

[Baroness Buscombe]

Yes, that is right. It would be absolutely outside the scope of the Bill.

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[Lord Watson of Invergowrie]

My Lords, I have added my name to this amendment, and the Labour Benches support the remarks made by the noble Baroness, Lady Garden of Frognal. She has a great deal of experience in the field of technical qualifications, so I have little meaningful to add. In earlier debates on the Bill, I have said that I hope to see a situation develop which leads to a small and relatively focused group of technical education qualifications. GCSEs and A-levels are instantly and universally recognised and accepted; I want to see something similar for technical education certificates. The current plethora of qualifications means that too few are understood, far less valued, and that diminishes the hard work that young people put into gaining them. How dispiriting it must be to emerge successfully from the end-point assessment only to find that the qualification gained is not widely recognised or transferrable to other employers.

Allowing the use of the DfE logo and consistent wording would standardise the technical education certificates issued, make it clear that they are overseen by the Department for Education and thus have a value transferrable throughout England. That measure is long overdue.

[Lord Lucas]

My Lords, I will speak to Amendment 32. I am trying to follow up on Second Reading and make a couple of suggestions to the Government which I hope are helpful.

First, if they have got this system of issuing certificates, they should make sure that, at the same time, they get the ability to communicate with apprentices. If I were in government, I would use this as a means of making sure that quality was being delivered, by sending questionnaires out to apprentices as a means of improving the quality of apprenticeships by asking what needed to be done better, particularly by asking them a couple of years after their apprenticeship what, with the benefit of experience, might have been improved. I would also use it as a way of getting information with which to celebrate the schools that apprentices went to. Schools pay far too little attention to the apprentices they have educated, mostly because they do not know anything about them. With university it is there; it is easy; it happens immediately. Apprenticeship information is not gathered in the same way; it is not celebrated by schools or made available to them. There are lots of things that the Government could do on the back of having the ability to communicate and I encourage them to give themselves that.

Secondly—I am echoing what is being said in Amendment 31—let us give these young people something really worth having, something to which they can put their name. The point of GCSEs and A-levels is that they are recognised. If we are taking away the plethora of sometimes well-valued names that attach themselves to technical qualifications, let us create a name and be able to give young people some letters to put after their name, such as BA—I do not actually know what these letters should be, but they should be something that say that the young person has done this and have got the right to this. I am not a wordsmith to create this, but once they are not an apprentice they are nothing—they are a former apprentice; it is like being a former priest, something suspicious. We should give them something that celebrates what they have achieved, in the same way that we do for people who have followed the academic path.

[Baroness Cohen of Pimlico]

My Lords, I support both amendments. I add—and would venture to do so only in Committee—a private loop around the question of naming and how apprentices get to be made more important. On further consideration, I do not like the title of the Bill: “Technical Education” does not seem to cover it. I have no idea how this could be done, but I wonder whether we could consider changing the name of the Bill to the “Professional and Technical Education Bill”. Among the groups named in the Bill that will be considered are lawyers, accountants and other variants. We tend to refer to ourselves as professionals. It would cheer up apprentices in those fields no end to know that they were recognised as professionals. In fact it would cheer up apprentices generally if it was not just about a technical education, but about a professional one, indicating that they will be a professional in their field. I am thinking also of some of the nursing and auxiliary qualifications that would sound a lot better if they were named as the professional qualifications that in fact they are.

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[Lord Nash]

My Lords, these government amendments will allow the Secretary of State to make sure that the data-sharing gateway in new Section 40AA remains fit for purpose through regulations. The regulations can include persons to whom the institute can disclose information or who can disclose information to the institute, and the functions about which the information may be disclosed. New Section 40AA will establish data-sharing gateways between the institute and Ofsted, Ofqual, the Office for Students or any other person set out in the regulations. There is already a separate provision for the institute to share information in relation to its own functions.

The bodies with which the institute is likely to need to co-operate and share information to do its job effectively are expected to change over time. That is particularly important given the reforms in higher and technical education. For example, the Quality Assurance Agency will not be named specifically in legislation and the quality arrangements in that area may change over time. It will be important to ensure that the institute can work effectively with whatever body is designated in that case, as well as any other bodies which take on roles in relation to education and training. All the disclosures under the gateways take precedence over any non-statutory restrictions, but they would be subject to all the important safeguards in the Data Protection Act 1998.

I reassure noble Lords that I am, however, absolutely mindful of the need to ensure full parliamentary scrutiny each time the Section 40AA power is used. Although not common in relation to similar regulations, where the negative procedure will be used, it is proposed that these regulations will be subject to the affirmative procedure. In view of this, I hope that noble Lords will accept this amendment.

[Lord Lucas]

Will the DfE be able to access this data, for instance to try to understand what history at school leads to what sort of performance in technical qualifications and apprenticeships?

[Lord Watson of Invergowrie]

My Lords, I welcome these amendments and want to say just a brief word about them, and in particular about Amendment 33.

On Report in another place Labour raised the issue of introducing the Quality Assurance Agency as a body to whom the institute can communicate information. The Minister, Mr Halfon, resisted at that time, saying that it depended on developments in the Higher Education and Research Bill. That Bill is still under way, but things have clearly moved on and the Minister has had second thoughts because we are pleased to hear that the Government now want to empower the institute to exchange information with all bodies with which it might need to do business, apparently without worrying about data protection legislation.

I would like one point of clarification on that. The amendment to Schedule 1 refers to “a relevant person” —we understand that a “person” is an organisation—and lists Ofqual, the OfS and Ofsted and then “a prescribed person”. The Quality Assurance Agency would be a prescribed person. When the Minister replies, will he specify the difference between somebody who is “relevant” and somebody who is “prescribed”? Presumably a prescribed person is not irrelevant but is not relevant.

The Minister and his colleagues are adopting the Opposition’s wider view of the role of the institute. Will he say which persons or bodies he and his colleagues have in mind to add, apart from the QAA, to which he referred? An obvious one is local government which can provide a bridge between school education and the world of work. Local government still retains various statutory duties for 16 to 18 year-olds, including duties under the Education Act 1996 in respect of ensuring education and training for persons over compulsory school age and of encouraging employers to participate in the provision of education and training for young people. The Minister may be aware that local authorities have duties in respect of young people with special educational needs and disabilities for whom the local authority maintains an education, health and care plan and for care leavers up to the age of 25. I should have said the Minister will be aware; it is a bit unfair to say he may be.

I also note that government Amendments 48 to 54, which we shall consider on Wednesday, make the local authority director of children’s services a person who must be informed about the insolvency of an FE college because, according to the Government’s explanation, such colleges will be educating care leavers, and the local authority needs to know to ensure that the local authority–appointed personal advisers to the care leavers know of the insolvency.

There are numerous reasons for local government to be involved. Perhaps the Minister will make a statement—I will be perfectly happy for it to be on Wednesday—about the anticipated roles of the local authority and the institute and how they will interact.

Technical and Further Education Bill

Lord Lucas Excerpts

Committee: 1st sitting (Hansard): House of Lords
Wednesday 22nd February 2017 Grand Committee

[Lord Lucas (Con)]

My Lords, I am grateful to my noble friend for that answer, but could he enlarge on what he said about how parents can have the confidence to encourage their child to do an apprenticeship? As I understand it, the IFATE is the body that will say whether an apprenticeship has been set up right. I would be grateful for my noble friend’s thoughts on how many such apprenticeships it has to cover, how often it will review them and what staff it intends to allocate to that job. I will come back to this frequently, because I am astonished that the IFATE thinks that it can do its work with 80 people.

Secondly, am I right in thinking that the IFATE also looks at the design of delivery—the whole process by which an apprenticeship will be delivered? Over how many instances of that does it think it will have oversight and what resources does it intend to devote to it? What burden of work does the IFATE think it has in this area and with what regularity does it expect to carry out its reviews?

Perhaps my noble friend could also enlarge on what he said about Ofsted. Ofsted is a pretty variable visitor to schools. To some it will come every six months and to others it will come every 16 years. Given that we are in a pretty unmapped part of the world, I hope that the Government are budgeting for fairly frequent Ofsted inspections to enable the reputation of this area to grow quickly. I would be grateful if my noble friend could tell me what Ofsted is planning in terms of the number of visits that it intends to make a year and the average frequency with which it expects to visit providers.

[Lord Nash]

I will write to my noble friend about that.

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[Baroness Morris of Yardley]

My Lords, I support the amendments in this group, particularly Amendment 11, to which I have added my name. I have some concerns about Amendment 61 in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Storey, which I will mention. I do not want to go over the arguments again except to add weight of numbers to the strength of the arguments we have heard from other Members today. I do not disagree with anything that has been said, I just want to make two or three points which perhaps have not been made or have not been made frequently enough. I hope I will not speak for long.

First, I hope the Minister will be really clear about when this careers strategy is about to appear. We have been promised it for a very long time and I think I saw something by his colleague who leads in the department for this piece of legislation about it coming later in the year. Given that it is about two years since a careers strategy was promised, I am not sure why a Bill such as this, which will fail unless there is good-quality careers education, is coming so far in advance of the careers education strategy. They should go hand in hand. We would not be having this debate if we had the careers education strategy. I think a lot of these amendments have been tabled in sheer frustration. We almost panic because we know it is such a weak area of our system and we are about to pass the Bill with no effective careers education system. We need to know when the strategy will arrive and we need to understand why it has been delayed. If there is a problem, we need to know about it. I worry about that.

Secondly, I agree with the information bit but that in itself is not careers education. There are two parts to this. We need the information but then we need to make the decision. As a young person—or even an older person—just having information is not sufficient. The skill of making the right decision is far more complicated. You can let as many people into the school to give information about as wide a range of jobs as you can, but when they leave at the end of the day, it is the teacher who is there with the young person when the decision is made. That is a very important other part of this situation. Information by itself will not necessarily change the young person’s mind—it might but it might not.

There are three big influences on the child in making the decision: their parents, their friends and their teachers. The strategy must encompass and reflect that. We cannot squeeze teachers out of careers education. We can bring people with a wide range of knowledge and experience into the classroom, but teachers will have an important impact on the decisions reached because they are the pastoral carers and they spend an awful lot of time with young people. We have been critical of teachers, and rightly so, but we need a careers strategy that supports them in the job they are being asked to do. We do not want to give them the impression that we want them out of this business. They have an important role to play in supporting young people to make the right, effective and appropriate decision.

Thirdly, we are moaning about schools—I do not disagree with a word my noble friend said; he made this point brilliantly—but the incentives the Government have put into the system are causing the problems. What do we do? We moan at the teachers. We are complaining about the schools responding in an entirely predictable and understandable way to the incentives that we have put into the system—including me in my time. The answer to that is to change the incentives, but we want to leave the incentives in place and change the behaviour. That will not work. Where is the discussion about changing the incentives because that is the surest way of changing behaviour? I agree absolutely with the noble Lord, Lord Baker, that the UTCs are a force for good. They had a difficult birth and baptism but they are still a major player in the field. In a way, they encapsulate the problems of the incentives in the system. Their very existence is threatened because we have the wrong incentives, and I say that collectively of politics and Parliament. The case he has made about having access to young people is strong, but other things need to be done as well.

My only concern about Amendment 61 is that it is too easy to say, “Leave it to Ofsted. It cannot be a good school unless it has good careers education provision”. We always say that, and then every 10 years we have to prune what we ask Ofsted to inspect. We pile so much on to Ofsted. With every new initiative that is introduced we say, “Let’s get Ofsted to inspect it”. That is how the relationship between schools and Ofsted breaks down; the inspectors are always seen as the bearer of the big stick. I want to turn the amendment the other way around. We are saying that if a school does not have good careers education, it will go into “requires improvement” or “special measures” because those are the only two categories left. There are implications in that for a college that we ought to be aware of if Ofsted is to be used as the lever in this. It is a bit mean, or premature, to put a college into the “requires improvement” or “special measures” category because it has not got right a plank of policy that we have not got right either. It behoves us to get our bit right before we say to any educational provider, “If you don’t get this right”—despite the fact that we have not—“you will go into ‘requires improvement’ or ‘special measures’ and the consequences will be big”.

I say to the Minister that we would not be having this conversation if we had more information about the Government’s plans for the careers strategy. It is a big and dangerous hole at the moment and therefore I strongly support the amendments, with the caveat about Amendment 61.

[Lord Lucas]

My Lords, the incentive I would like to see is schools being allowed to take credit for the performance of the children they let go into technical education. If a child might get only Ds in history and English but they are good for an A* in BTEC business, and the school can get credit for that, the school’s interests will align with the child. It would also be a good thing for the performance tables. We have superb data because it is easy enough to collect them, but why should a school be penalised for a kid who arrives in the year before GCSEs, having had a dreadful education beforehand? That is not fair; nor is it fair that a school which has really looked after a child and brought them on to the point where they have the get up and go to attend a UTC then gets no credit for it. If a school feels that the best interests of the child will align with the way it is going to appear in the tables, there is a real hope for making progress in this area. We should be doing this anyway to ensure equity between schools, so I hope that this is a direction we might consider going in.

I like the amendment about a technical version of UCAS, which is immensely helpful to schools. Everything is in one place and it would all look and feel the same. You know how it works and what is required and it becomes easy to provide support and advice for the children using it.

Apprenticeships are a great challenge. Companies have a horrible habit of not admitting they have apprenticeship places until about two weeks before they want people to apply. They suddenly appear, enough people apply, and they disappear again. This is not the way in which a school can work or how young people should be asked to work. We have to discipline companies to make it clear in good time that they are open to apprenticeships so that people who are interested can see what is on offer year round and put their names down. I know that it will never be a regular cycle such as UCAS, but we need to discipline the system so that it works in the interests of children, and something like UCAS would help. A UCAS system would also provide a place to find all the information. If someone is looking for an apprenticeship they might not cotton on to who the education provider is, who to go to, which Ofsted report applies, where to look to find the outcomes, and other data that will tell them whether a particular apprenticeship is worth while. Something like UCAS would draw all that together. I would not actually use UCAS. It is a horrible institution that believes in making as much money as possible from the students passing through its system and it is run in the interests of universities rather than kids. But as a concept it is great, and we really ought to see whether we can do something along those lines.

It is high time that Amendment 11 was brought in. We all know how badly schools can behave. The noble Baroness, Lady Morris of Yardley, says that it is a matter of incentives as well. Let us have a structure which provides the stick and the carrot—this is the stick. Let us have a system where schools know that they are expected to do things. I presume that access means physical access. It cannot just be, “Well, we’ll pass your emails on”. Clearly the access will be moderated by the school and the teacher will sit down with the kid afterwards and tell them where they need to be really careful about such and such. However, at least it is progress in the right direction.

I hope that we might look at expanding subsection (3). There are some really important intermediary organisations which perform a function in this area. To name just one—Women in Construction. It performs a specialist job and looks after a particular subset of pupils, and it is doing that in a co-ordinated way, which makes it much better than your average local FE college, let alone a building company that happens to have some apprentices. Giving access to some of these collaborative organisations is a very useful supplement to the direct education and apprenticeship providers.

Turning to the carrot element again, there are other ways of doing this, and that is what my Amendment 34A seeks to achieve. It would allow money to flow to schools and organisations and would open up in a positive way the pipeline between what is going on in the creation of technical opportunity and the kids in schools.

There is a lot beyond what appears in Amendment 1l and schools are doing much that is positive. They invite people in to talk, and make arrangements for internships and work experience placements for their children. A lot of organisations are helping, but it is an immense burden on a school at a time when we are facing something like an 8% cash reduction for schools over the next three years. It is a hell of a thing to ask a school to add to its functions without in any way adding to its budget.

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[Lord Baker of Dorking]

My Lords, I find these amendments very interesting because they pose the question of what sort of beast we are creating in the Institute for Apprenticeships. The points made by the noble Baroness, Lady Garden, exactly address that. In the Institute for Apprenticeships we have created a body with clear functions. It has to sort out shoddy apprenticeships and try to bring some sense to the maze of technical qualifications. They are very important jobs, but they are essentially administrative, functional jobs. Surely the Institute for Apprenticeships will not be spending government money in the future; it will be spending money provided by industry and commerce. Therefore, the Government should really take a back seat from then on. They should be concentrating on what they are responsible for—the skills gap. They have to devise policies that close the skills gap. The improved apprenticeship system will do a great deal towards that, but it cannot do it alone. Closing the skills gap also needs major reforms in further education colleges to improve their effectiveness. If they had been as good as they think they are, we would not have as big a skills gap as we do at the moment.

The Government’s other responsibility is to try to ensure how our education system can improve technical education, which in fact it is destroying in schools at the moment. Those are policy matters and the main policy of the Government in this regard is what they can do to close the skills gap.

Where does that leave the Institute for Apprenticeships? It leaves it as a much more independent body. It is not spending government money. The question that the Government should be asking the Institute for Apprenticeships is: what contribution are you making to closing the skills gap? They should not therefore interfere with the institute apart from that, in my opinion. The eight directors appointed so far are quite a feisty lot of independent people. The institute should become the main policy area for apprenticeships and should do the sort of things indicated in the Liberal amendment.

This is a very different body, I suspect, from the one the Government think they are setting up. They still want to keep their sticky fingers on the Institute for Apprenticeships even though they are not providing the money. The money is being provided by industry and commerce—by business. The steering wheel should be taken away from them, and the Institute for Apprenticeships should become an important body, reviewing each year whether the whole apprenticeship system is right. It should decide whether apprenticeships should start at 14, not the Government—which I happen to support. It should decide about approving new providers, the terms for which are set out in Clause 6, and I am sure it would do it in a very professional way.

This is quite an interesting group of amendments, and I look forward to the Minister’s reply. This is an area that should slip away from immediate government control because the Government are not putting up the money.

[Lord Lucas]

My Lords, I support what my noble friend has said. The Government are creating a very powerful body. It will own the intellectual property in all the technical qualifications for the routes described in the Bill. There will be no other institution with any long-term interest in evolving or maintaining those qualifications or in developing a name and a reputation that parents and others can rely on. Below the Institute for Apprenticeships and Technical Education, we have a series of short-term contracts. City & Guilds—I sit on its council, which everyone knows is nothing, but at least indicates affection—will disappear at this level. There will be no City & Guilds qualifications; they will become qualifications of the institute for apprenticeships. City & Guilds, being a charity, may bid for a seven-year contract to be an awarding organisation or to look after one or two of the routes, but it will not be awarding City & Guilds qualifications, rather it will just provide a function for the institute.

We are creating something much closer to the German model. We are losing what remains of the lodestars that the British Computer Society, City & Guilds and others have been providing in terms of the name and quality of their qualifications and replacing them with a new structure. This structure needs to be more powerful and conscious of its role than it is described as being in the Bill. I would like to see the Government follow the logic of what they have produced in the Bill and create a creature which is capable of the long-term responsibilities being placed upon it. It may be that the Government need to acquire City & Guilds, which is after all a quasi-government organisation anyway. Perhaps they need to take it on board to provide the strength, history, continuity and the people needed to run the sort of thing that is being set up in the Bill, or at least to provide the engine for it. I do not see how dispensing with all that the good awarding bodies have created and providing a structure which does not have the power to do what is necessary is a safe way of proceeding with a very important part of our education system.

[Lord Nash]

My Lords, I am grateful to the noble Lords, Lord Watson and Lord Hunt, and the noble Baroness, Lady Garden, for the four amendments in this group. They address important issues relating to the Institute for Apprenticeships and Technical Education and, in particular, what functions it will have. I will address my remarks only to these four amendments and will start by responding to Amendment 6. Ensuring that new further education institutions provide high-quality provision is of course of the utmost importance. Through the area reviews process for the further education sector, we are also putting the sector on a secure financial footing by ensuring that the provider base matches student demand.

However, the institute is to be established with a very specific remit in relation to the quality of reformed apprenticeships: to set the quality criteria for the development of apprenticeship standards and assessment plans; to approve or reject proposed standards or plans and review them periodically, as appropriate; and to ensure that all end-point assessments are quality assured, including the potential to quality assure them itself. It will also advise the Government on the maximum level of government funding available for each individual apprenticeship standard. And, of course, the proposals in this Bill seek to extend its functions to technical education qualifications and related matters. It has no role at all, and is not expected to have a role, in relation to the authorisation of new further education institutions, even those that will deliver technical education qualifications in the future. It is therefore not appropriate to make this amendment to the Bill in the light of the expected remit of the institute.

I turn to Amendment 8, for which I am grateful to the noble Baroness, Lady Garden, and I wish her a happy birthday.

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[Baroness Garden of Frognal]

The amendment is in my name and that of my noble friend Lord Storey. I have previously raised concerns about the limitations of the word “technical” in the Bill. The long-standing term “vocational”, which was inclusive of all trades, crafts and professions that involved skills and practical aptitudes, has apparently fallen out of favour and “technical” has been deemed to carry more status. However, stonemasons, florists, film-makers, nurses, care workers and caterers do not see themselves as primarily technical operatives.

I worked for City & Guilds for 20 years. In my day, we did not think of it as a quasi-governmental organisation but rather as a long-standing, highly respected, royal chartered, charitable educational organisation. But there we are. I hope that times have not changed too much. In my day there were two main strands of vocational qualification—technical and craft. Then there were personal services, which was another important skill area, in which people skills were of paramount importance.

At Second Reading, the Minister, in reply to my question about whether craft, creative and service skills were intended to be covered by technical education, said:

“The answer is that they are”.—[Official Report, 1/2/17; col. 1261.]


However, the Bill does not say that. It is surely only in an Alice in Wonderland world, or perhaps even under the new American regime, that words mean what I say they mean. I checked the dictionary—at my age, one has to do that sort of thing—and found that the prime definition of technical is,

“pertaining to the mechanical arts and applied sciences”.

It was some comfort to find a secondary definition, which was,

“appropriate to a particular art, science, profession or occupation”.

That is better but not what is widely understood by “technical”.

For everyday purposes, the Bill should not be marginalising all those whose practical, work-based achievements are in craft, personal services or creative fields. The wording in my amendment may need some changes but the gist is that “technical” does not cover the myriad of work-based achievements. It needs expanding to be more inclusive if the new institute is really to be seen as a champion for all types of skill and practical achievement.

Rather than go through the whole Bill expanding “technical” each time it is mentioned, I propose that at the outset we explain that non-technical work skills will also come within the remit of the Bill. I hope that the Minister will see that this makes sense and be prepared to accept this modest and, I hope, helpful amendment. I beg to move.

[Lord Lucas]

My Lords, there is virtue in encompassing all this sort of education within one structure. I do not see the point in excluding bits because, presumably, they are felt to fall below the status of “technical”. Areas such as retail or caring are as technical as a lot of jobs that are included in this structure. I therefore hope that this is an amendment and approach to which the Government will give consideration.

[Lord Aberdare]

My Lords, I add only one very small point: it seems to me that part of the problem with the esteem in which some of these technical and professional qualifications are held is that they are seen in a rather narrow light. The word “technical” rather reinforces the problem. A lot of people who might be interested in creative or public sector qualifications or some others might be put off by the word “technical”, which makes it seem more narrow than it needs to be.

Technical and Further Education Bill

Lord Lucas Excerpts

2nd reading (Hansard): House of Lords
Wednesday 1st February 2017 Lords Chamber

[Lord Lucas (Con)]

My Lords, I welcome this Bill and declare my associations with City & Guilds and the Good Careers Guide, as recorded in the register. I will start by looking at the interface between what this Bill does and schools. As the right reverend Prelate has just said, on the supply side of technical education we have IFATE—which is actually an astrology website, so perhaps we need a different name for it—and in the interface between technical education and schools, we have the Careers & Enterprise Company, which is showing immense promise. But we are missing the bit inside schools. How do you manage the interface within a school, with all these multifarious opportunities and things that need to be understood and looked at, when you have, as the noble Baroness, Lady Morris, said, a very straightforward system of teaching children to some very well-defined exams?

The answer, as the Minister suggested to me on other occasions, is to have a dedicated person within each school whose responsibility it is to interface between everything going on in the school and the plethora of opportunities outside and to make sure that a lot of it gets in and is understood. Without that flow we will be in serious danger of having blocked pipework. All these opportunities we are creating outside are just not getting into schools—not being seen by the pupils who need them and not being understood by schools, or indeed by parents.

The answer, or at least an answer that we should look at, is to allow employers to devote some, say 5%, of their apprenticeship levy to unblocking this pipe—through, I would suggest, the Careers & Enterprise Company, because we want to know that it will be well managed—to allow employers to say, to some degree, “I want to work with this school and that school”, but allowing the Careers & Enterprise Company to divert some money to its cold spots. Then we could start to build a really active and close association between employers, schools and pupils.

This would influence the direction that pupils take in life in the sort of way that my noble friend Lord Baker was talking about. If there is a really active understanding and appreciation of what employers want, it would encourage pupils to move in that direction. Estonia is a good place to learn lessons from, and we could pick up on its idea of computer-based maths, too. To go in the direction of greater connectedness between schools, and to do it now because we are creating so much extra technical education, would be a useful thing that we could move forward on with the Bill.

I will also pick up on certification. It seems to some of the people who have been writing to me a bit odd that the Government should be taking on the role of certification of technical qualifications—but I think it is a great opportunity. We will suddenly have a consolidated list of former apprentices and holders of technical qualifications. There are all sorts of uses for that. We can push continuous professional development, and we can get a lot of feedback on the qualifications and apprenticeships that we are providing and feed that into the system for improvement. We will have a register of people who have been through these things, which will make it much easier for them to get employed and for us to understand where shortages are.

The other thing we should do in that instance is to give these people something to put after their name. We give university graduates BA, or something similar. What are we going to do for apprentices? They cannot call themselves “former apprentices”. We need something in which they can take pride and which enables them to say, “I am an apprentice and I passed”. It should not be just university graduates or, indeed, school leavers, who can put something after their name.

My next question on the Bill concerns how the 15 routes—I do not know what you call them; since this involves Sainsbury’s, they should probably be called “aisles”—work. How do we get from standards which are quite loose, with phrases such as, “must be good at IT”, to something which is well specified, absolutely clear and has a set of deliverables on which qualifications and assessment materials can be built? I do not understand who it is intended will do what job in that process. I shall be quite content for the Minister to give me some homework in this area; I just have not found what I need at the moment and would be grateful for his help. But I hope that we are not going into something which is too top-down. We have tried this before with technical qualifications. I liked the feel of diplomas but we just did not get it right—and nor did we with individual learning accounts. This needs to be a much more bottom-up process as well as the top-down organisation, and I hope that that is what we shall see.

Who in this structure is really doing quality assurance? Who is making sure that the process is running well, and how does that work? How do industries such as utilities interface with it? There is no utilities aisle; it is sort of scattered between three or four of them, but it is an area where we are looking at some very big employment opportunities as technology changes. How does it work for an industry such as that?

I have another question in this area: how do single awarding organisations work? This is a discussion we had concerning GCSEs a few years ago. We settled on keeping a multiplicity, and I think for very good reasons: you get flexibility; you avoid single points of failure; and it is much easier to spur on improvement and to change something that is not working well. Why are the Government going in a different direction in a much more complicated area, where it is very difficult, even within one aisle, for one awarding organisation to be expert at everything and to cover every variation within that aisle?

The Bill as drafted takes intellectual property away from awarding organisations and gives it to IFATE. That is a very unusual structure. Usually, if an organisation has put a lot of investment into creating assessment and qualification structures, that is the intellectual property of the organisation—and for good reasons, too, because that gives it an incentive to continue to develop and keep the quality up.

We are also looking at a lot of qualifications that will embed vendor qualifications, certainly in the tech area, because that is what employers want. Are we really saying that their IP will also be ceded to IFATE? We need to look at this corner carefully to make sure that we have the incentives and the practicalities right.

On insolvency, as the noble Baroness, Lady Wolf, has already said, we need to think about what happens with training providers and, indeed, awarding organisations when they go bust, as the Bill will put them under a lot of stress. We need to understand how they work, because they are just as capable of tipping learners into an abyss if they go under.

I look forward to the Bill’s Committee stage—I think that it will be a great deal less stressful for the Minister than the Higher Education and Research Bill was for his colleague—and I wish it well.

Higher Education and Research Bill

Lord Lucas Excerpts

Committee: 6th sitting (Hansard): House of Lords
Wednesday 25th January 2017 Lords Chamber

We have heard much about the importance of student satisfaction in our deliberations, and rightly so. That is one of the metrics that is supposed to drive up teaching standards, yet it seems to ignore the fact that good teaching depends not just on well-qualified staff but on well-motivated staff. What sort of motivation stems from not knowing whether you are going to be teaching a class next week, far less next term or next session? That is a question universities have to consider very carefully and the requirements of Amendment 368 will encourage them to do that. Those that place short-term economic considerations before the long-term interests of their staff—and, by extension, their students—are treading a path that leads to poorer standards and potentially lasting damage to their reputation. Institutions that have nothing to hide in terms of employment practices—and their impact on staff/student ratios—have nothing to fear, and neither should the Government in accepting this improvement to Clause 59. I beg to move.

[Lord Lucas (Con)]

My Lords, I have three amendments in this group. Amendment 371 urges the Government to make as much of these data open as possible. This is not really the pattern with university data at the moment. Even HESA, which is an easy organisation to deal with, none the less guards them closely so that it can charge fees for their release. I think life will be a good deal better for prospective students if that information is more widely used, available and circulated. It is a principle the Government have established in other areas such as Ordnance Survey and the Land Registry, and it has worked extremely well. I would like to push the Government in that direction so far as university data are concerned.

My second amendment is Amendment 383 and we have been here before. It should be obvious that the principal customers for these data are prospective students. They are the ones who need to know about universities. We really ought to take the views of people who look after prospective students into account in deciding how data should be made available.

I have tabled Amendment 413 because there is a tendency for bodies, once you have given them the power to charge, to start inventing things to do, because they can always get them paid for. Look at UCAS, for example; it probably does five times as much as it needs to. The central “apply” function, which everybody uses, is only about 20% of UCAS’s activity. The rest it can get paid for and it is interesting, so it does it. This body ought to be under tighter financial discipline than that.

[Baroness Garden of Frognal]

My Lords, I support the amendments in this group, particularly Amendment 368, which is about the number of staff on non-permanent contracts and zero-hours contracts, as the noble Lord, Lord Watson, set out. As we have discussed before, these sorts of metrics might be more valuable to the TEF than many of the metrics already in it, because the non-permanent staff and zero-hours staff will have a greater impact on teaching quality than many of the other things which the TEF purports to measure. On Amendments 376 and 377, it is important at all stages of the Bill to ensure that adult, mature and part-time students are included as part of the student population.

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[Viscount Younger of Leckie]

I will attempt to answer the points made by my noble and learned friend. Surely this is encompassed by the safeguards that I outlined. There will be an opportunity on a regular basis, as I mentioned, to analyse and scrutinise the statement showing the amount of fees, including those that are unconnected, and how they were made up.

[Lord Lucas]

My Lords, I am grateful to my noble friend for his reply on Amendment 371, but I think he rather missed the point. In respect of school data, the Department for Education already publishes extensive information, under the heading of performance tables, as open data. The level of information has grown substantially over the years and is free for anyone to reuse, as is the database on schools, EduBase. I am very sorry to say, as the proprietor of the Good Schools Guide, that this has resulted in the emergence of a lot of competitors, which is thoroughly tiresome. While it would be convenient for me if the Government did not do it, it is very good for the economy and for students and pupils that they have, and it is the pattern I would like them to pursue with regard to university data.

The Department for Education also makes available the National Pupil Database, which is confidential, at various levels. The whole database is available to the “very serious” level of researchers, but anonymised information is also available at pupil level, which is immensely useful for understanding how schools are operating and how various examinations and other aspects of the school system are working. That is a precedent for really good practice that is, now, contained within the same department that will look after university data.

The practice for university data is different. It is either held by UCAS, in which case it is effectively not available to anybody, or by HESA. In the latter case, there is a long application process to determine whether it will let the data out because nothing is standardised and you have to ask permission from individual institutions. It then charges a hefty fee. This is a comfortable situation for me, as a user of HESA data, because it means I do not get a lot of competition, but it is not the way the market should be. The market should be open. The only reason that the use of the data is charged for is that HESA wants to make money out of it. If it is given the power to charge institutions then it is in the interests of the economy and the country that it makes it freely available whenever it can. It is much better for the country that HESA should make a little bit of money by making it available in a more restricted way and for a large fee, or a substantial fee—not an unreasonable fee; HESA is a good organisation. We should go open. The Government, as a whole, have made a lot of progress in making much bigger collections of data open, when they were formally charged for. There has been a lot of benefit from that. That is the practice we should follow with the university data.

[Lord Watson of Invergowrie]

My Lords, this has been a livelier group of amendments than had been anticipated. Gratitude is due to the noble Baroness, Lady Wolf, for exciting some controversy. It is a surprise that the shortest amendment to the entire Bill—it is just two letters—led to so much impassioned debate.

The Minister is treading on rather boggy ground if he feels that his legal people will be able to counter the argument of the noble and learned Lord, Lord Mackay, about the precedent for statutory bodies. The Minister has developed the practice of writing letters to us in Committee. I suggest to the noble and learned Lord, Lord Mackay, that he might write to the Minister on this particular point and perhaps assist in clarifying the position and getting the Minister to think again.

I liked the noble and learned Lord’s point about spotting a reference to an employee in the Bill. He was, of course, referring to a part that we will consider on Monday, but that it took his legal eagle eye to detect it underlines my point about staff being notable by their absence from the Bill, and hence, I would suggest, being undervalued. I take on board what the Minister said about it being expected that the OfS will consult staff. Experience tells us that expecting organisations or employers to do something on behalf of their staff often leads to disappointment, and that is why I believe it should have been a bit more explicit in the Bill. I suspect, however, that his comments today may well be quoted by a number of staff and their representative organisations in future. There is another question, which perhaps he could answer in one of his famous letters, which is: what recourse would be open to staff if it was shown that the OfS was not considering their views, as I suggested in my amendment?

Other noble Lords spoke about financial issues, which I think remain as they were prior to the debate, but it has been both enjoyable and interesting. On that basis, I beg leave to withdraw my amendment.

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Moved by

[Lord Lucas]

416: Clause 63, page 39, line 37, at end insert “, limited to the specific activities of the registered provider under the same contractual conditions as registration.”

[Lord Lucas]

My Lords, many of the providers which will come under this Bill are operating with similar qualifications in other markets and countries. I thoroughly approve of this clause and what it aims to do, but the providers deserve the same level of confidentiality from researchers as they get from regulators. I beg to move.

[Baroness Goldie]

My Lords, I thank the noble Lords, Lord Stevenson and Lord Lucas, and the noble Baroness, Lady Wolf, for raising these important issues.

The amendments seek to limit the power of the OfS or someone working on its behalf to carry out efficiency studies on HE providers under Clause 63. I assure the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, that we entirely accept the principle of what he is seeking to achieve here. For many providers on the register the teaching of higher education will be just a part of their overall business. Many providers will also carry out other activities, such as offering corporate conference facilities or operating sports facilities which the public can access.

Let me also assure my noble friend that the Government would not want the OfS to look at the efficiency of those other activities. Instead, the Government would expect the OfS to confine its efficiency studies to providers’ HE teaching activities. I accept that the Bill does not explicitly limit the OfS’s efficiency studies power in the way my noble friend seeks but we do not think that these amendments would achieve that laudable end. They seek to link the OfS’s efficiency studies power to those activities which are subject to the contract between the OfS and the provider relating to the provider’s registration. A provider’s registration, however, is not subject to a contract.

The Bill is not, though, entirely silent on how the OfS should carry out its functions. I point to the general duties this Bill places on the OfS in Clause 2(1)(e), which requires the OfS to,

“use the OfS’s resources in an efficient, effective and economic way”.

Furthermore, Clause 2(1)(f) places a duty on the OfS to have regard to,

“the principles of best regulatory practice, including the principles that regulatory activities should be … transparent, accountable, proportionate and consistent, and … targeted only at cases in which action is needed”.

Let me also assure my noble friend that individuals conducting efficiency studies on behalf of the OfS will be subject to the same confidentiality requirements as the OfS.

I hope that these latter points provide my noble friend with some reassurance that the OfS will carry out its efficiency studies in the focused way he seeks to achieve. This level of focus is certainly something the Government want to see. In these circumstances I ask him to withdraw Amendment 416.

[Lord Lucas]

My Lords, I am very grateful to my noble friend for that explanation, which I shall go away and chew over. It is not that the university might be running a tiddlywinks club for money that worries me, but that it may well be selling the same higher education product as commercial training outside the university sector, or internationally online. These are both money-making activities where the university is concerned about commercial confidentiality but, under the Bill’s current wording, researchers might be asked to look at and gather data on them.

I shall have to do some work between now and Report, but I hope the Government will look again at what I have said today. I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.

Amendment 416 withdrawn.

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[Baroness Brown of Cambridge]

My Lords, in moving Amendment 420, which is in my name and that of my noble friend Lady Wolf, I will also speak to Amendments 421 and 421A in my noble friend’s absence.

These amendments bring us back to the discussion we had previously about the costs and charges of the OfS. The purpose of the amendments is to probe the issue of who will act to control the costs and charges of the regulator—the Office for Students. Higher education providers will pay these charges, and hence students, at the end of the day, will have to bear them. The OfS is referred to frequently as a regulator by Ministers and others talking about the Bill, but nowhere is it clear in the Bill whether or not the OfS will have to sign up to the Regulators’ Code, published by the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills in 2014. If it was clear that the OfS was covered by the code, it would provide some of the reassurance sought in a number of amendments to the Bill.

The code for example requires that regulators must consider how they can best minimise the,

“costs of compliance for those they regulate”—

the issue behind some of these amendments. They also,

“should avoid imposing unnecessary regulatory burdens”,

and,

“should carry out their activities in a way that supports those they regulate to comply and grow”.

As your Lordships can hear, the language of the Regulators’ Code is both clear and supportive. Can the Minister provide assurance that the OfS will sign up to the Regulators’ Code? It would be helpful in providing clarity and reassurance to the sector. I beg to move.

[Lord Lucas]

My Lords, I am greatly in sympathy with what the noble Baroness has just said. I very much hope that universities will carry those principles through into their current practice of taking lots of money off students who are studying humanities in order to give it to students who are studying sciences. The little bits of money being unfairly taken off students to fund the OfS are not a very substantial worry in proportion to what universities are already doing to students on different classes of course.

[Lord Stevenson of Balmacara]

My Lords, I will speak to Amendment 423 in my name. The question is about grants to the OfS for set-up and running costs, but there is the additional possibility, picked up in the amendment of the noble Baroness, Lady Brown, that there may be other aspects and bright ideas that come to mind about how these charges might be recouped. The amendment asks whether or not there are tight guidelines available which would restrict the ability of the OfS to raise funds in a broader sense other than specifically for set-up and running costs. I look forward to hearing the Minister’s response.

The point raised by the noble Baroness, Lady Brown, in her opening remarks on Amendment 420 is important, because we still worry a bit about what the nature of the beast called “OfS” is. Is it a regulator? It has been said that it is, and if it is, does it fall under the Regulators’ Code? I think I heard the Minister say on a previous amendment that it did not qualify to be considered within the code of practice for regulators. But if that is so, why call it a regulator? It will cause confusion and doubt if, in the public mind, it is a regulator for the sector but in fact it is not because it does not fulfil the criteria that would normally apply to other regulators. As the Minister said, these are not unhelpful comments in relation to regulator practice. They would clarify a lot of the uncertainty we have been experiencing in terms of how the regulator will operate. It might be that there is a case for it, even though it was not intended.

The noble and learned Lord, Lord Mackay, has pointed out a number of times that there are other statutory provisions and considerations that might bear on how this Bill is constructed and issues relating to it. It is wise to have a wider net on these matters than simply to focus on the wording of the Bill. If there are other considerations that we ought to be aware of, it would be helpful if the Minister could respond, making quite clear what it is that drives the determination that the regulatory code does not apply in this area, even though some of the factors might be helpful and effective in terms of how it discharges its responsibilities.

--- Later in debate ---

[Baroness Garden of Frognal]

My Lords, I support the amendment. As the noble Baroness, Lady Wolf, said, the possible proliferation of new universities is likely to include a great many offering subjects such as business and management, and far fewer offering subjects such as civil engineering, artificial intelligence and modern languages—whereas it would make sense for any new provision to arise out of shortages in disciplines and skills within the UK.

Secondly, there are parts of the country that are ill served by further and higher education. I have noble friends from Berwick-upon-Tweed who often relay the lack of local provision for local people to study. This is a cause of unfairness, not only in the north-east but in other parts of the country which are also ill served. If new provision were being set up it would make a lot of sense to look geographically at the parts of the country where there is less provision for people to study. Surely it would be a helpful part of the duties of the Office for Students to ensure that new providers should be established only—or mainly, perhaps—where they meet needs both of location and of provision. The amendment therefore seems a helpful addition to the Bill.

[Lord Lucas]

I too support the amendment. There are things that only Governments can do. If we want an example of creating universities, we should look at the career of our late colleague Lord Briggs and what he did, and what the status of the institutions he created is now. They are considered to be top-ranking universities. As the noble Baroness, Lady Wolf, said, they were just made and put in place and they ran. It can be done. Indeed, it is happening overseas: other countries are doing it.

We are proud that we have a collection of top-ranking international universities. Why do we not want another one? What would it take to make another one? It would take substantial action by the Government. Do we need a tech powerhouse on the lines of Stanford or MIT? Yes, I think we probably do. As my noble friend Lord Ridley said, there is a space for that—but it is not going to happen through little institutions founding themselves. We have seen enough of what that is like. I am involved with a couple of small institutions trying to become bigger ones, and it is a very hard path. Reputation is hard won in narrow areas, and it takes a long time. Look at how long it has taken BPP to get to its current size: it has taken my lifetime.

The Government can make things happen much faster, and if they realise that things need to be done, they can do that. For them to come to that realisation, a process of being focused on it is needed, and the committee proposed in the amendment certainly represents one way of achieving that. I would like to see, for instance, much wider availability of a proper liberal arts course in British universities. By and large, they are deciding not to offer such courses. If the Government said, “We want to see it; we will fund this provision”, and if the existing universities did not respond, we could set up a new one, in a part of the country that needed it. That would be a great thing. Equally, the idea might be taken up by existing universities. That is not going to happen through the market, because the market in this area is far too slow. But the Government can do it, and they ought to be looking to do it.

[Lord Stevenson of Balmacara]

I support the amendment and endorse everything that the noble Baroness, Lady Wolf, said in introducing it. She hit the nail on the head very firmly. There are issues around new providers. There is not very good evidence, and the evidence that there is seems to be anecdotal rather than scientific. The information published recently by HEPI threw doubt on whether many of the institutions that have come forward were bona fide or would survive, and some questionable practices were exposed—so there is an issue there.

In addition to the points that the noble Baroness made, which I endorse, there is, again, a gap in the centre of what the Office for Students is being established to do. It could have been imagined—pace the points made by the noble Lord, Lord Willetts, about not wanting to overload the OfS—that it would have a responsibility to speak for the sector to the Secretary of State about the gaps that it may see in provision, and the issues that may need to be picked up in future guidance. I would have expected that to be the normal thing.

However, it is interesting to see that the general duties in Clause 2 do not cover it. They are all about functions to do with quality, competition, value for money, equality of opportunity and access. They are nothing to do with surveying and being intelligent about the future and how it might go. However, as the noble Viscount, Lord Ridley, said, the game may have changed a bit now with the publication of a strongly worded industrial strategy—or at least, we hope it will turn into an industrial strategy after the consultation period. Out of that will come a requirement to think much harder about the training and educational provision that will support and supply the industrial machine that we will need as we go forward into the later parts of this century. It therefore makes sense to have advance intelligence about this, and to recruit from those who have expertise. It makes even more sense to do that in the way suggested by the amendment.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Lucas]

My Lords, can my noble friend confirm, as I gather from his speech, that the proposals made by the Home Secretary in her speech to the Conservative Party conference in relation to students are no longer being proceeded with?

[Viscount Younger of Leckie]

My understanding is that during that speech she undertook to go ahead with the consultation, as I have made clear.

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[Lord Rees of Ludlow]

My Lords, I fully endorse the amendment and the remarks of the noble Lord, Lord Patten. I am from a different university but it has entirely similar concerns. I work in a small department where all of the last five faculty appointments were of people from outside the UK. Crucially, we depend upon being attractive to these people but it has been much harder to persuade them to accept positions post Brexit, because not only is there uncertainty about their future employment but they will almost certainly risk losing the freedom for their family to come here in the post-Brexit era. Therefore, we have the same concerns of many other segments of society.

One has only to imagine a young academic from, say, India, Singapore or China deciding which country they wish to work in. It is clear that the attraction of the UK compared with other countries has been greatly diminished by recent events and, unless we can send a signal to counter those trends, we will lose out in the long run. I note that the Government promised some special treatment for bankers; I think that, equally, they should provide it for other skilled occupations, including academics.

I want to make one further remark. Of the last six presidents of the Royal Society, three were born outside this country. We have had a great tradition of attracting to this country scientists who have made their careers here because of the appeal of our universities and our scientific excellence. All that is in jeopardy if we do not pay regard to the concerns expressed in connection with this amendment.

[Lord Lucas]

My Lords, I hope that in the course of this Bill we will make an amendment somewhere in this area or in that of the previous amendment, and I think that we will have to consider carefully what that amendment is. We know that we will be up against a tough negotiator who, in the case of Brexit, has said that no deal is preferable to a bad deal. Unless we can steel ourselves to that level, we will not get our way.

[Lord Stevenson of Balmacara]

My Lords, this has been another good debate. In some senses the previous amendment and the two amendments in this group are two sides of the same coin. The first amendment, proposed by the noble Lord, Lord Hannay, set an aspiration for what we were trying to do about the flow of students that, for all the reasons we gave, we wanted to see. The two amendments we are discussing now deal with the detail of how we could achieve that—they could probably be combined to make the point made by the noble Lord, Lord Lucas.

I do not need to say much more about this; I just want to put one point. On our first day in Committee we spent a lot of time talking about what we thought about our universities, what they were and what they were about. We have not really come back to the amendment we were debating then—which is probably just as well, as the wording was, I admit, not very good. The essence of it was an attempt to reach out to an aspiration that everyone in the Chamber, apart from those on the Government Front Bench, felt—that universities do have a particular distinctive nature and character. I argue that these two amendments help us to articulate that in a rather special way: for all the people who attend those universities—our children, and any other students who come to them—we want the very best quality of teaching and research available. That aspiration can be met only if we are able to recruit for it, and that is what these amendments would achieve.

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[Baroness Deech]

My Lords, I have spoken many times before about freedom of speech. I want to link together the Prevent guidance amendment, this amendment and Amendment 469. In my view they stand and fall together because they are trying to demarcate the line between lawful and unlawful freedom of speech. That is all that matters, including in the Prevent guidance.

People often see freedom of speech as too broad and as encompassing everything, but it is always within the law. I anticipate that in response the Government will say that freedom of speech is already guaranteed. However, Section 43 of the Education (No. 2) Act 1986 is too narrow. It is treated as limited to meetings and to the refusal of the use of premises to persons with unpopular beliefs. Universities have not handled this well. They have wrongly refrained from securing freedom of speech where student unions are involved, on the grounds that the unions are autonomous. That is not the case under charity law, nor does it fit with the universities’ own public sector equality duty. Moreover, Section 43(8) of that same Act expressly includes student unions. Universities have treated their duty as fulfilled if they have a code of practice concerning freedom of speech.

However, the practice of censorship is spreading, both by universities and by student unions. As I have explained before to this House, many explicit restrictions on speech are now extant, including bans on specific ideologies, behaviours, political affiliations, books, speakers and words. Students even get expelled for having controversial views. The National Union of Students has a safe-space policy and brands certain beliefs as dangerous and to be repressed, without regard to what is legal or illegal. The academic boycott of Israel-related activities is illegal as it discriminates against people on the grounds of their nationality and religion, and is contrary to the “universality of science” principle. Indeed, in this era of Brexit we should point out that attempts to put barriers in the way of exchange between scientists and other academics, inside or outside the EU, who wish to collaborate in research and conferences conflict with the principle of the universality of science, and it would be the same if other European states put barriers in the way of UK researchers. A recent bad example of behaviour is the LSE, which silenced a lecture by its own lecturer Dr Perkins because of his unpopular views on unemployment.

Freedom of speech in the UK is limited. I will not give noble Lords the whole list of measures; I shall name just a few. It is limited by the prohibition of race hatred in the Public Order Act 1986, the Protection from Harassment Act 1997, the Equality Act 2010, and the Charities Act 2006 as it applies to student unions, defamation, the encouragement of terrorism and incitement to violence. There is a great deal of law for universities to take on board in permitting lawful freedom of speech in any case.

We need a new clause to go beyond meetings and make all this clear. Students have been closing down free speech and universities have neither intervened, nor protected it, nor taken action when it is lawful— or unlawful. We all recall when the Nobel laureate, Sir Tim Hunt, was hounded out of University College London. Section 43 was irrelevant, because his tasteless joke was made abroad. Universities are not taking up training offers about freedom of speech—what is lawful and what is unlawful. This amendment would ensure that lecturers and university authorities took cognisance of the law, got training in it and ceased to treat student unions as autonomous. They should know that they have a duty to promote good relations between different groups on campus under the Equality Act. I wish this amendment were not necessary, but it is.

[Lord Lucas]

My Lords, I very much support Amendment 468. It puts the matter clearly and positively. It needs doing. You only need to look at what is happening in US universities. There is a particularly nasty story coming out of Princeton today on the suppression of free speech. This ought to be the core of what is happening in universities. Within universities, we ought not to prohibit people from offending other people. There has to be the free exchange of ideas and this can be pretty buffeting from time to time. As is said in Amendment 468, if there are things going on which are illegal, then we should deal with them as illegal. Beyond that, we should not. We should allow ideas to flourish and grow and contest with each other at universities.

I do not support Amendment 469 in the same way. The idea of preventing speech requires you to know in advance what is going to be said. This means, if you fear that someone might say something, you are justified in stopping them coming to speak. This is a very difficult road to go down. Yes, take sanctions against people who allow illegal speech—this seems reasonable. If I invite a speaker in and they are then horrifically unlawful, I should face sanctions for that, even if I lose my right to arrange future meetings. However, to prevent it—to say that somebody at the university should know what someone is going to say in the future—I do not think is a good way to go.

I hope we will have the courage to stand behind Amendment 468 and say where our principles are because there is a great tide of the opposite coming across the Atlantic.

Higher Education and Research Bill

Lord Lucas Excerpts

Committee: 5th sitting (Hansard - continued): House of Lords
Monday 23rd January 2017 Lords Chamber

This is simply a saving amendment, and I hope that the Minister will say whether it is the Government’s intention to adopt this amendment or to offer one of their own to the same effect on Report in order to ensure that this long-standing, beneficial and, indeed, unique provision is explicitly respected in the Bill. If the Minister is unable to be so definite, perhaps he might be willing to arrange a meeting before Report to discuss how best the necessary provisions can be made.

[Lord Lucas (Con)]

My Lords, I rise briefly to support my noble friend Lord Norton’s amendment, which would be the ideal. Certainly, we have to move away from where we are in this. I do not find the idea of validation by the OfS satisfactory, with all its conflicts of interest, but universities which set and mark their own degrees are used to that sort of conflict. This sector seems plagued with such conflicts, but I would rather do without them. We have to get to a point where universities acting as validators are not permitted and are in some way controlled by the OfS—if we do not have the arrangement that my noble friend proposes—so that they do not indulge in competitive behaviour in the way that they have in the past. It is an extremely unsatisfactory process at the moment. Validation can last for three years only. That is not in the interests of students. They must have longer-term arrangements with the universities and the universities must be held to them, if that is what we are to go on with.

One can look at examples such as the London College of International Business Studies—a 150 year-old institution, one way and another—which has its degrees validated in Switzerland. It has gone to the altar three times with UK universities, each time being left in the lurch, although it got a QAA pass in the course of one of them. It is now engaged to the Open University and has high hopes of it. I wish it good fortune, but that is not a fair way of asking an organisation to get degree-awarding powers. There has to be good behaviour and consistent behaviour on behalf of the universities.

We also need to solve the problem facing Cordon Bleu. It is an institution operating in 20 countries, awarding degrees in most of them, and extremely highly respected. It cannot come to the UK because, under the validation arrangements currently in place, the validating institution gets a complete licence to use the validatee’s IP to do whatever it wants. Indeed, we have seen one of Cordon Bleu’s competitors pillaged in that way by a UK university. All its IP was taken and used to run that university’s own degrees. That cannot be permitted as a relationship between someone seeking validation and someone offering it.

Whatever we do, we must improve where we are. I am not particularly impressed by what is in the Bill at the moment, but I very much hope that between us we can reach something that will support the entrance of good organisations to degree-awarding in this country in a way that takes account of their quality and the good reasons that they have for thinking they might be allowed to award degrees. However, as others have said, the legislation must absolutely protect the reputation of degrees in this country. We cannot have a situation where substandard organisations get to award degrees.

[Lord Stevenson of Balmacara (Lab)]

My Lords, this has been a very interesting debate. It has shone a light in strange places that I did not think we would ever get to. As a not very good Scottish Calvinist, I am probably the least able to contribute to the debates that were organised by my noble friend Lord Murphy and the right reverend Prelate. However, they make good points and I hope the Minister will be able to help to move that debate forward.

I do not like the idea that my noble friend Lord Murphy’s institutions have to act illegally but be forgiven in the courts when they are finally taken account of. We should get ahead of the game and try to sort this out.

We started with the question of how research awards needed to be done jointly between UKRI and the OfS, if that is the body. This is something we will come back to, so it is no disrespect to say that we need not spend too much time on it now, particularly as the principal proposers of Amendment 509 are missing, in one case because of fog and in the other, I think, because of Cambridge. I cannot remember which is which—your Lordships can probably guess. It is therefore probably better if we pick that up when we come back.

That leaves the central issue posed by the noble Lord, Lord Kerslake, which is how we can find a structure in a system that has institutions of the highest quality by all accounts that can provide the assurance, support and effective answers to any of the questions raised by new challenger institutions, without those challenger institutions feeling that their operations and ways of working will be squished in some sort of force majeure that will be offered by the established club.

The amendments are very interesting. The words that have been used to attack the concept of probationary degrees need nothing further from me; I think that is right. That is not the way the Government should go on this. We are looking at a way of making sure that the quality assessment—the ability to come to an enduring decision about an institution that wishes to seek degree-awarding powers—is done in a way that reflects its ability to fulfil the necessary requirements in terms of capacity, financial security, academic capacity and the rest, but does not interpose somebody else’s view about what the institution should be doing on top of that.

The right reverend Prelate suggested that some of the stuff he was talking about had been going on since 1533. That puts in perspective people’s worries about a four-year period during which tests are made of whether institutions coming into the system are able to cope. Certainly, my discussions, which were mentioned by others, suggested that people who had been through that process found it valuable, so it would be very stupid to throw it away without further consideration.

I went down memory lane with the noble Lord, Lord Norton of Louth, because I started my career in academic administration with CNAA. It was bureaucratic and a little heavy-handed but it worked very effectively. It is interesting that the final vestiges of CNAA still exist in the Open University. Maybe that is where we might want to look, as a future amendment suggests, before we start trying to create something that will not stand the test of time or advance higher education in the UK, and may indeed cause problems, many of which have been raised in this short debate.

--- Later in debate ---

Moved by

[Lord Lucas]

305: Clause 46, page 27, line 8, at end insert—
“( ) The OfS may propose conditions on validation arrangements between two registered higher education providers in order to protect the student interest including—(a) referring registered providers to an appointed arbitration panel to resolve disputes related to existing arrangements, and(b) giving guidance to registered providers on existing arrangements.”

[Lord Lucas]

My Lords, when I talked earlier about the need to give the OfS some axis in making sure that validation arrangements work well, this was what I meant. I beg to move.

[Lord Stevenson of Balmacara]

That is the second speediest moving of an amendment I have heard so far in Committee. I will be almost as brief, since we have alluded to the fact, if we have not specifically mentioned it, that the answer to a lot of our problems about the validations issue, which will come up in both this and the following group, where there is a clause stand part, and the power of validation of last resort being given to the Office for Students is to pick up the fact that the CNAA, of blessed memory, still exists, in rump form, in the Open University. That is where all its functions and assets were transferred—not that it had very many assets, I am sure—at the time of its dissolution, around the time that the polytechnics were given their degree-awarding powers and we abolished the binary line, effectively. So we have a situation in which it would be possible, I think, to obtain a validator of last resort at very little cost and certainly at no considerable worry in terms of new structures or arrangements. It would certainly resolve one of the issues that is devilling the question of the powers of the OfS, and I very much hope that this amendment will be considered very carefully.

--- Later in debate ---

[Viscount Younger of Leckie]

My Lords, in view of the very brief comments made by noble Lords in this extremely short debate, I shall also keep my comments short. I am happy to write to noble Lords if they feel that my comments are too short.

I understand that my noble friend Lord Lucas’s amendment is born of a wish to protect students, but I reassure him that there are already strong protections in place. I also reassure noble Lords once again that on our student protection plans our policy is to ensure that students’ interests are protected if a provider’s validation agreements break down.

I will comment a bit further on providers declining to validate on quality grounds. We expect that the OfS’s commissioning process should be open and transparent, so that providers clearly understand what would be expected of them if they agree to extend their validation services to other registered providers in this way. In all cases we expect the commissioned provider would need to be assured of the quality of the provision that it agrees to validate. The OfS’s commissioning process should therefore allow providers to decline to enter into validation agreements on quality grounds. So we believe that this amendment is not necessary. I therefore ask my noble friend to withdraw Amendment 305.

[Lord Lucas]

My Lords, I thank my noble friend for that brief reply. Perhaps he might enlarge on it when we meet, if not in a letter afterwards. I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.

Amendment 305 withdrawn.

Higher Education and Research Bill

Lord Lucas Excerpts

Committee: 5th sitting (Hansard - continued): House of Lords
Monday 23rd January 2017 Lords Chamber

[Lord Lucas (Con)]

My Lords, to pick up on the recently finished speech of the noble Baroness, Lady Wolf, I thoroughly agree with the three main points she made. First, producing a mixed indicator, as the Government propose, would not be useful to students or others looking at the quality of a university or a course. It would be like composing a meal out of mincemeat, cornflakes and cleaning fluid. Each of those things is useful in its own right, but mix them together and they have no function. Keep them separate, as the noble Baroness advocated, and you get some very useful data on which students can judge in their own terms the quality of a university.

Secondly, let these things be criterion-referenced. We have a real problem at the moment in GCSE—we are saying that every child should get English and Maths, but we are making that impossible, because we make these exams harder as students do better. About 30% are required to fail in order to meet the requirements of Ofqual. We have to be careful about this when we are looking at a bronze, silver or gold indicator. If we do not make these indicators criterion-referenced, we are saying that, whatever happens— however well our universities do—we will always call 20% of them bronze. In other words, we will put them into an international students’ “avoid at all costs” category. That seems a really harmful thing to do. If these criteria mean anything —if there is a meaning to any of the elements going into the TEF—we should be able to say, “We want you to hit 60%.” Why not? Why do the criteria have to be relative? They do not mean anything as relative criteria. They must have absolute meanings and they must be absolute targets.

Thirdly, this really adds up. The noble Lord, Lord Liddle, made it clear that gold, silver and bronze indicators—this big step change between the three grades —are not suited to a collection of imprecise measures. You do not know whether an institution that you have placed towards the bottom of silver is actually bronze or, worse, whether something in bronze is actually in the middle of silver. It is not that exact. You have to do what the Government do elsewhere in education statistics—for example, in value added on schools—which is, yes, to publish a value, but publish a margin of error too. That way, people get to learn that you might be saying: “This is actually 957 on your scale of 1,000, but the error margin is somewhere between 900 and 1,010.” You get used to the imprecision, to understand that this is not precise, so you can put a proper value on the information you are being given.

[Lord Watson of Invergowrie (Lab)]

My Lords, I am speaking to the proposal, in the name of my noble friend Lord Stevenson, that Clause 25 should not stand part of the Bill.

That clause refers to the Office for Students taking over HEFCE’s current administrative responsibilities to deliver the TEF on behalf of the Secretary of State. I say in passing how disappointed I am that so many in your Lordships’ House, whom I thought would come to hear this debate on TEF metrics, have now departed. Perhaps that was not the reason they were here after all. Those of us who are ploughing through the Bill until all hours of the night realise that this is an important topic. The fact that we have had so many speakers on it is a clear reflection of that.

As the Minister will be aware, there is widespread concern across the sector at the use of proxy metrics, including statistics on graduate earnings, in an exercise that was supposed to be about teaching quality. On the face of it, there is some logic to the metrics. It is difficult to imagine an excellent course, the teaching, support and assessment for which the students think are rubbish, and that a large proportion of the students do not complete; or that hardly anyone who completes it manages to find employment or get a place on a postgraduate course.

Where metrics are used, they have to be much more securely evidence-based than those suggested. Last week in Committee, our Amendments 196 and 198 would have obliged the Office for Students to assess the evidence that any proposed metric for assessing teaching quality is actually correlated to teaching quality, and ensured that, prior to making that assessment, the OfS consulted those who know first-hand what is needed to measure teaching quality: academic staff and students. The Minister did not comment on that point, so it remains one on which I should like to hear his opinion. The importance of ensuring the statistics used are reliable and evidence-based cannot be overstated. They must earn and retain the confidence of the higher education sector—and that involves academics, students and administrators.

In her Amendment 201, the noble Baroness, Lady Wolf, seeks to ensure the quality of the statistics used by the OfS, and this should be a basic requirement. I support my noble friend Lord Lipsey in questioning the validity and value of the National Student Survey. The survey merely asks students about their perceptions of teaching at their institution. By definition, these perceptions are subjective and cannot involve comparing institutions. I heard what the noble Lord, Lord Willetts, said, when he suggested that similar institutions could be compared in terms of their ethnic make-up and students’ economic background. That kind of benchmarking sounds improbable at best because, even if suitable comparators could be found, the question is, how would the outcome be weighted?

It sounds as though gold, silver and bronze categories would be created before the metrics had even been measured. As I said, that sounds improbable to me, and I agree with the noble Baroness, Lady Wolf, that benchmarking is surely not the answer. Linking institutions’ reputations to student satisfaction is likely to encourage academics to mark more generously and, perhaps, even avoid designing difficult, more challenging courses.

With academics increasingly held accountable for students’ learning outcomes, students’ sense of responsibility for their own learning—something I thought was a core aspect of higher education—will surely diminish. We are now entering an era where students dissatisfied with their grades can sue their universities. Improbable as that sounds, only last week the High Court ruled that Oxford University had a case to answer, in response to a former student who alleged that what he termed “boring” and “appallingly bad” teaching cost him a first-class degree and the opportunity of higher earnings.

This may be the shape of things to come. Last year, nearly 2,000 complaints were made by students to the higher education Ombudsman, often concerning contested degree results. Nearly a quarter were upheld, which led to universities being ordered to pay almost £500,000 in compensation. Does anyone seriously believe that the introduction of the TEF metrics will lead to a reduction in such complaints?

Metrics used to form university rankings are likely to reveal more about the history and prestige of those institutions than the quality of teaching that students experience there. The Office for National Statistics report, on the basis of which the TEF is being taken forward, made it clear that they were told which metrics to evaluate, leading to the conclusion that these metrics were selected simply because the data were available to produce them. It is widely acknowledged that students’ experience in their first year is key in shaping what they gain from their time at university, yet the focus of the proposed metrics, of course, is mainly on students’ experiences in their final year and after graduation.

The ONS report was clear that the differences between institutions’ scores on the metrics tend to be narrow and not significant. So the majority of the judgment about who is designated gold, silver or bronze will actually be based on the additional evidence provided by institutions. In other words, an exercise that is supposedly metrics-driven will in fact be decided largely by the TEF panels, which is, by any other description, peer review.

Although the Minister spoke last week about how the TEF would develop to measure performance at departmental level, the ONS report suggested that the data underpinning the metrics would not be robust enough to support a future subject-level TEF. Perhaps the Minister can clarify why he believes that this will not be the case—the quality of courses in a single university tend to be as variable as the quality of courses between institutions. As I said in Committee last week, this would also mean that students’ fees were not directly related to the quality of the course they were studying. A student at a university rated gold or silver would be asked to pay an enhanced tuition fee, even if their course at that university was actually below standard—a fact that was disguised in the institution’s overall rating.

Learning gain—or value added—has been suggested as an alternative, perhaps better, measure of teaching quality and is being explored in other countries. At a basic level, this measure looks at the relationship between the qualifications and skills level a student has when starting their degree programme, compared to when they finish—in other words, a proper, reliable means of assessing what someone has gained from their course of study.

The BIS Select Committee report on the TEF metrics published last year recommended that priority should be given to the establishment of potentially viable metrics relating to learning gain. I hope the Minister will have something positive to say on that today, or, failing that, on Report. We do not believe that the metrics as currently proposed are fit for purpose; more importantly, nor do many of those within the sector who will be directly involved with the TEF. That should be a matter of some concern for the Minister, for his colleague the Minister for Universities and Science, and indeed for the Government as a whole.

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Moved by

[Lord Lucas]

207: Schedule 4, page 81, line 42, at end insert “and that no class of registered higher education providers is unrepresented, and that all individual registered higher education providers have had a voice in who is chosen to be representative of them,”

[Lord Lucas]

My Lords, in moving Amendment 207 I shall speak to the other amendments in the group. The amendment covers a point I have made before—that it is essential that the whole sector should be represented in these organisations, not just the bits that the old universities like.

Amendment 392 would extend the Secretary of State’s access to information to anything they may be required or interested to know under any enactment, rather than just under the Bill.

Amendment 395 would appoint HESA—I suspect it is HESA being talked about at this point—to take an interest in people who intend to become students, not just people who become students, because a lot of the data they produce will be used to inform people as to whether to pursue a course, which is not really of much interest to those who have already taken that decision. It is important that HESA should focus on the students-to-be as much as on people who are already students.

Amendment 400 is an alternative to Amendment 207. I do not blame the current HESA regarding the provisions of Amendment 401. It is a trap that UCAS has fallen into of putting money and its constituent institutions ahead of the interests of students. This is a difficult thing with all such bodies, such as Ordnance Survey and others: the money tends to become the focus of what they are doing. It needs government to pull them back to focus on the interests of the country as a whole and, in this case, of students in particular. As long as the Office for Students has power to keep a body on the straight and narrow in this regard, I shall be quite satisfied that the Bill does not need this additional wording.

The anti-competitive conditions in Amendment 403 again look at the way UCAS has become a constraint on the way individual universities reflect students. Anti-competitive behaviour should always be subject to the very closest scrutiny by government to justify it. I would like to know that the OfS can keep its eye on that.

Amendment 407 goes with Amendment 395. I beg to move.

[Baroness Goldie (Con)]

My Lords, I thank my noble friend for drawing attention to a range of concerns relating to how the designated bodies will operate. I offer my assurance that we share the intention that legislation must support these bodies to be responsive to the needs of current and prospective students, and representative of the whole sector. I am happy to discuss these amendments further when we meet—although, given my state of health, I quite understand if he wishes to postpone that pleasure.

The role of the designated data body is to provide reliable and robust data on the sector for students, prospective students, the OfS and the sector itself. It will gather and make available source data, but it will not to be the sole source of information. The designated body functions most closely resemble those currently carried out by the Higher Education Statistics Agency—a sector-owned body that collects and publishes official data on higher education. I should clarify that the role currently under discussion is not related to the current role of UCAS. The designated body functions do not extend to running an admissions service. I reassure my noble friend that it is absolutely the Government’s intention that the interests of prospective students will be taken into account in the new system. The Bill already allows for this.

Amendments 398, 401 and 403 would create additional conditions for the designated data body to put the interests of students above that of higher education institutions and the commercial interest, and to ensure that data collection is not anti-competitive. The Government support the broad thrust and intent of the amendments, but believe that the current drafting is sufficient. The new data body will have a duty to consider what would be helpful to students and prospective students. However, it would not be in the spirit of co-regulation to direct the order of interests of the body.

I assure my noble friend that there is no intention to give the designated body a monopoly over data publication. We have a wide range of organisations involved in providing information for students, including specialist careers advice services aimed at mature students and career changes. We would not want any reduction in this choice for prospective students. While the Bill gives the designated body the right to receive information from providers, it does not give the body any right to prevent providers sharing those data with other organisations.

On Amendments 207 and 400, the Bill already requires that the persons who determine the strategic priorities of the designated data and quality bodies represent a broad range of registered higher education providers. The quality and data bodies are designed to be independent of government, so it would not be right to prescribe the make-up of a board in the way these amendments do. Rather, the bodies should have the ability to take a view on the mix of skills they require for the challenges they face.

The Government have confidence that they have the right balance here. In these circumstances, I therefore ask my noble friend to withdraw Amendment 207.

[Lord Lucas]

My Lords, I am very grateful for the answer my noble friend has given me and for her offer of further conversations if there is anything, on reflection, I think she has not covered completely. I beg leave to withdraw my amendment.

Amendment 207 withdrawn.