Part-time and Continuing Education and the Open University

Lord Northbrook Excerpts

Thursday 5th July 2018 Lords Chamber

[Lord Northbrook (Con)]

My Lords, the whole House should be grateful to the noble Baroness, Lady Bakewell, for initiating this debate. I declare an interest in that my wife, who was born and educated in Canada and who never went to university, has recently started an Open University undergraduate course in history and history of art. I am already impressed with the variety of essay subjects she has had to cover, from Antony and Cleopatra to Stalin and Khrushchev, religious dissent in the 18th century, the art of Benin, and colonial attitudes to African societies. I am also impressed by the attention to detail in the marking of her essays.

I asked my wife to obtain her tutor’s views on the state of the OU and she replied as follows, giving me permission to quote her views. The most important point she made was that after the vice-chancellor, Peter Horrocks, resigned,

“the first thing the acting vice-chancellor did was scrap the ‘Students First’ brand which just about everyone working for the OU found to be toxic. It implied we had previously been putting something else first, and many, including me, found this to be an insult”.

Her final comment was:

“Most of my colleagues have felt so impotent having to stand by and watch whilst the OU has been forced into some kind of weird and inappropriate business model”.


I refer now to the petition organised by Change.org to give an indication of the concerns about the previous vice-chancellor. The petition states:

“The detrimental changes that have occurred include tutorial system changes, meaning that many students are allocated a tutor with whom they couldn’t possibly attend a tutorial”—


due to geographical location—

“and therefore have to attend a tutorial with another tutor; often leading to confusion on assessment criteria. Furthermore, the Open University has continued to alter the way they present their modules, moving away from print books towards online material. This is despite many students voicing their preference of print books to work with”.

A final issue were his comments,

“claiming that Open University academics ‘don’t teach’. The blatant disregard for the work and effort put in by OU academics leads to the final conclusion by many that Peter Horrocks needs to be replaced as Vice-Chancellor in order to save the Open University from irrelevance”.

In the time available, I want to make a very few points. The number of part-time entrants to higher education across the UK has fallen by 47.5% since 2008-09, with all types of course affected. The most striking fall was in those enrolling in foundation courses, certificates and diplomas. A 2014 report said that,

“falls in employment – particularly in the public sector”,

have been a major contributing factor.