Post-18 Education and Funding Review

Lord Patten of Barnes Excerpts

Tuesday 2nd July 2019 Lords Chamber

[Lord Patten of Barnes (Con)]

My Lords, I will begin by declaring a few interests. I was chancellor of Newcastle University, a very good Russell Group university, for a number of years; I have been the elected chancellor of Oxford—the last election that I won—for 16 years; and, after I left the European Commission, I was a member of the working group that established how the European Research Council would work. Over the years, British universities have done exceptionally well out of peer-driven research under the ERC.

I should confess at the outset—it is good for the soul—that I have not always read every word of reports that I have commented or given speeches on. However, I did read every word of this report. It is extremely well written—I hope that does not sound patronising. There are one or two blemishes: I think the phrase “low-tariff universities” does not do much justice to the English language. However, by and large, it is well presented and extremely well written. The comprehensive referencing is probably a tribute to the number of academics on the panel. If you follow through with the referencing to the end of the report, you discover the IFS report indicating that graduate earnings have a great deal to do with the lifestyle of the graduate before university. This sort of drives a hole into one of the arguments the panel uses elsewhere for determining the value of courses. However, it is an extremely good report overall. It will provide very good resources for future discussions on higher and further education—I hope that is not too back-handed a compliment.

The rumour was that this would be the Government’s answer to the Corbyn effect at Glastonbury and that, because people thought that young voters had gone to Labour because of the promise to get rid of tuition fees, the right answer was to find a Tory version. Frankly, I think that that is a lot of baloney. Most students are too smart to think that you can get rid of all tuition fees without having some effect on public spending elsewhere. After all, they are not running for the leadership of the Conservative Party. They are perhaps a little smarter on the existence or non-existence of money-bearing trees. Also, reducing the tuition fee by £1,750—in what is, after all, a pretty regressive package of measures—will not have very much effect on young people’s voting habits. However, the decision to reinstate maintenance grants is very welcome. I hope the Office for Students will also think that, because it has been rather critical of our bursaries at Oxford, which are more generous than maintenance grants. I hope it will think again on that.

As the noble Baroness has just said, the most welcome part of the report is what is said about FE. The report quotes my noble friend Lord Baker as referring to FE as a Cinderella at the end of the 1980s. In 1985-86, I was the Minister responsible for FE and schools. It was a Cinderella then. As the noble Baroness has just remarked, FE—Cinderella—has been very badly treated since then by successive Conservative Governments. In 1990, FE spending per pupil was 50% higher than in secondary schools. By 2015, that had fallen so that FE spending per pupil was 10% below that in schools. We know that FE spending has fallen in real terms since 2010 and the cost has been closed courses, closed and badly maintained colleges, and teaching salaries in FE being much below those for similar jobs in schools. It is intolerable. It is shameful for Governments who have consistently and properly talked about the importance of doing something about low productivity in the British economy. I hope that this part of the report will be implemented by a Conservative Government —if there is one—or any Government in the future. It is exceptionally important.

I want to make three general points about what the report has to say about HE. First, there is a heroic assumption that the money lost to universities in tuition fees will be provided by the Government in some other way. I imagine that universities, their governing councils and vice-chancellors would take that assurance with a warehouse of salt, given past experience about university funding. We are told that any loss of income will be made up by changing the teaching grants so that we will get more in for STEM subjects and less for humanities and social sciences. Unless that happens—and unless there was some adjustment—we would lose about 17% of our tuition fee income at Oxford, for example.

The formula used for the shift from the humanities and social sciences to STEM is pretty absurd. It gets us back to the low-tariff and low-return universities. At some universities, humanities and social sciences may not be taught as well as they might be, but what happens when that is all the university does, such as at SOAS? It has been a very great university, though it is in some financial difficulty at the moment. At Oxford, our social sciences come first in the world in the QS rankings and many of our humanities subjects come extremely high. I do not think it makes very much sense to penalise those as proposed in the Augar report, not least given that we get huge and well-paid employment opportunities for graduates in those areas.

I also have an intellectual horror of talking about the humanities and social sciences in entirely utilitarian terms. I remember being criticised once when I was talking about the importance of people studying translating Voltaire. I was asked what that did for the country’s gross domestic product. It is perfectly true that the answer is, “I haven’t got the faintest idea”, but that is not actually the point. We know that a lot of things are done and taught at universities which would make us poorer as a society if they were not, even if you cannot demonstrate that they make us richer because we do them. I am very reluctant to accept the argument about shifting all the grant from the humanities and social sciences into STEM subjects, although they are extremely important.

I will make two other brief points. First, we tiptoe gently around the question of the different roles of different universities. We have been doing it ever since we doubled the number of universities by calling all the polytechnics universities. This was at a time when, frankly, some of the polytechnics were better than the universities, so it was not a question of suddenly giving the polytechnics a great lift up in the world. In Oxford, there are two fine universities. They do different jobs. We should not be too nervous about saying that universities have different functions and objectives. The report says—and I totally agree—that almost all other countries have very clear categories of university. Why are we in this country not prepared to accept that and face up to it? This is a debate that should be led by the higher education sector itself; it should not be imposed on higher education and higher education institutions by Ministers or quasi-ministerial bodies. It is a debate in which universities themselves should get engaged. Certainly, I do not believe that slightly wimpish phrases about getting the OfS to “bear down” on the cost of some courses is the right way to address a serious issue. If only we had a system like the Californian one we would not have to get involved in all this.

My last point is, I guess, the most important; it might sound disobliging to the authors of this admirable report. Universities are facing tremendous problems with the approach of Brexit whether with or without a deal. There are implications for students, for our research, for the professors and lecturers at our universities, and for our income streams. These are turbulent times; I hope that we will not add to that turbulence the gale force of a complete overhaul of university financing. We should help universities over the next period; the Government have so far been unprepared to say how they see the way forward.