Education: Part-Time Study

Lord Rees of Ludlow Excerpts

Wednesday 24th July 2013 Grand Committee

[Lord Rees of Ludlow]

My Lords, I congratulate the noble Baroness on initiating this debate. My comments will focus on universities as that is the sector I am familiar with. Universities could surely develop more flexibility in two respects. First, there should be a “credit” system that allows students to gain intermediate qualifications as well as to intermit and to transfer more readily between institutions. Secondly, universities should seize the opportunities offered by the internet to extend their reach.

As we know, university enrolment has hugely expanded since the student days of most of us. However, this entirely welcome expansion has not been accompanied by sufficient growth in the variety of the offerings of universities. Nearly all of them still focus on degrees that take three or four years. They are incentivised to aspire to rise in a single league table—which, incidentally, under-weights things that really matter but are hard to measure, such as how rigorous the courses are and how hard the students work. The norm is, of course, for young people to enter university more or less straight from school for full-time study. A downside of higher enrolment levels is that career opportunities for non-graduates are worse than they were in the past.

We should recognise that degree-level competence need not be achieved by continuous study in a traditional residential university. Moreover, there is nothing magic about the specific level of achievement of a degree. Credits, even if not sufficient for graduation, should be formalised. It is surely better that universities should take risks on admission, give students a chance, and let some leave after two years with a credit. Some will continue after a gap, perhaps at another institution. Others may pursue part-time distance learning. Even those who go no further should not be typecast as wastage. An American will say, “I had two years of college”, and will regard the experience as positive.

Higher education is a driver of social mobility. However, as Alan Milburn and others have shown, mobility is stagnating. Young people who have been unlucky in their schooling will not have at the age of 18 a fair chance of access to a selective university even if they have great potential. Worse still, generally they have no second chance. The optimum solution to the problem is to enhance teaching at all schools across the full geographical and social spectrum, but that will take a long time. In the shorter term, we can widen opportunities by learning something from the United States.

In California, for instance, a substantial fraction of those who attend the elite state university of Berkeley come not directly from high school but as transfer students from a lower-tier college. Our most selective universities should likewise earmark a proportion of their places for students who do not come directly from school, but have gained credits by studying at another institution, part time or online. The Open University’s OpenPlus programme, which offers two years of part-time study, is very valuable. It allows students to get up to speed so that they can be admitted into the second year of several other universities.

The importance of mature students, part-time courses and distance learning in the UK’s overall system is surely going to grow. That makes last year’s drastic decline in enrolments, revealed by HEFCE, especially worrying. It is perhaps an unintended consequence of the fee structure, of perceptions of that system among potential students, and of their lack of confidence in taking on debt even if loans are available.

Despite the overall fall, the OU has to some extent bucked the trend with a major campaign to explain the new loan scheme to potential students. We should highlight and acclaim the special role of that great institution. The OU model of distance learning supplemented by a network of local tutors and mentors has vastly more potential in the era of the internet and smartphones than when it was founded. We all have free access to the wonderful material on the OpenLearn website, much of it prepared jointly with the BBC. The OU can surely take a lead in the development of so-called MOOCs: massive open online courses. The razzmatazz around these courses comes from some very successful initiatives by Stanford and other US universities. There are now two major organisations in the US, edX and Coursera, which disseminate courses developed by leading universities.

It is excellent news that the Open University has set up a similar system called FutureLearn. UK universities should eagerly seize the opportunity to widen their impact and support the OU by contributing material to FutureLearn rather than getting locked into one of the US platforms. This is an arena where the UK has huge worldwide potential. The Open University should have a competitive edge globally, especially as some of its private-sector US counterparts have recently suffered reputational damage. Distance learning will have a transformative effect to the extent that it will threaten the future of many traditional mass universities of the kind that exist in Italy and India, which offer little more than lectures to large classes with minimal feedback.

Finally, I will mention another benign spin-off from the internet: the democratisation of research as well as of learning. We are immersed in a cyberspace that is ever more information-rich and sophisticated. Many archives are now available on the web, which is a huge boon to scholars around the world who are not close to a major library. To take a specific example, amateur scholars are reading and transcribing ships’ logbooks from the 18th and 19th centuries, which contain fascinating social history as well as important data on the history of climate change. The involvement of amateurs has been traditional in sciences such as botany, but the scope for citizen-scientists is now far wider. In my subject of astronomy, there are sometimes so much data that the professionals cannot scrutinise them all fully. It is now possible for eagle-eyed amateurs to access these datasets and themselves discover new planets. Thanks to the internet, advances can be disseminated rapidly, even throughout the developing world. Indeed, more projects can now be done co-operatively and globally, rather like improving open-source software.

There are huge opportunities, but to exploit them for maximum benefit our system needs a more diverse ecology and a blurring of the lines between higher and further education, between full time and part time—which is most relevant to this debate—and between residential and online. We need a more effective transferable credit system to facilitate transfers between institutions and to allow continuing professional development. By so doing, we can exploit the benefits of the internet, offer a more realistic second chance to young people who have been unlucky in their early education, and promote lifelong learning for us all.