Higher Education Funding

Lord Rees of Ludlow Excerpts

Thursday 12th September 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Rees of Ludlow (CB)]

My Lords, the UK’s whole post-18 education system surely needs not only a greater funding stream but more institutional variety, and increased flexibility in its offerings.

There is currently a systemic weakness. The missions of individual institutions are not sufficiently varied. They nearly all aspire to rise in the same league table. Most of their students are between 18 and 21, are undergoing three years of full-time, generally residential, education, and are studying a curriculum that is probably too narrow even for the minority who aspire to professional or academic careers. Even worse, the school curriculum is too narrow as well.

Students should be able to choose their preferred balance between online and residential courses, and to access distance learning of higher quality. We need a blurring of the damaging divide between technical and university education, and a consequent shift towards the attitude that a vocational diploma has the same status as a degree. We should abandon the view that the standard three-year full-time degree is the minimum worthwhile goal. The core courses offered in the first two years are often the most valuable.

Moreover, students who realise that the degree course they have embarked on is not right for them, or who suffer problems of various kinds, should be enabled to leave early with dignity, with a certificate to mark what they have accomplished. They should not be disparaged as “wastage”. More importantly, they—and everyone else—should have the opportunity to re-enter higher education, maybe part-time or online, at any stage in their lives. This path could become smoother if there were a formalised system of transferable credits across the whole system, as urged in the Augar report supported by the previous Government, and a flexible grant or loan system.

Admission to the most demanding and attractive courses is naturally competitive, but the playing field is still far from level. Many 18 year-olds of high intellectual potential have had poor schooling and suffered other disadvantages, often dating from their pre-school years.

It will be a long slog to ensure that high-quality teaching at school is available across the full geographical and social spectrum. In the meantime, it would send an encouraging signal if UK universities whose entry bar is dauntingly high were to reserve a fraction of their places for students who do not come straight from school. They could thereby offer a second chance to those who were disadvantaged at 18 but have caught up by earning two years’ worth of credits at other institutions or online. Such students could then perhaps advance to degree level in two further years.

What about graduate-level education? In the US only a minority of universities have strong graduate schools. That is a model which, as other noble Lords have said, the UK should move towards.

I shall say a word here about foreign students. We should surely welcome talent at graduate level, especially from the global South—and not just for the money those students bring in. Indeed, we should foster international north-south collaborations in advanced teaching and research—in food science, health and clean energy, for example. This could prevent a widening gap and resist brain-draining of the talented students to the north, so that they can pursue careers that narrow their own nations’ gap with the north.

Universities are currently one of the UK’s distinctive strengths, but we should not be complacent. The sector must not be sclerotic. A rethink is overdue if we are to sustain its status in a changing world. It needs to be responsive to changes in needs, lifestyles and opportunities. It will then be able to offer springboards to the long-term prosperity not just of our nation but of the world.