Higher Education and Research Act 2017 (Consequential, Transitional, Transitory and Saving Provisions) Regulations 2018

Lord Storey Excerpts

Wednesday 9th May 2018 Lords Chamber

These are the considerations which are preoccupying me, and I will look very earnestly at how the new system is operating in order to judge whether it is up to the task. In the immediate situation, I simply cannot understand, whatever my misgivings, which should be self-evident, about the board and its role, how a board is expected to do a job adequately and properly if it has no representation from the academic community and no representation from the students. This is quite simply ridiculous.

[Lord Storey (LD)]

My Lords, I am grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Hunt, for giving us this opportunity to consider progress made and to mull over some of the issues. Over the course of the past six months or so, I have put down several Questions to the Minister on higher education matters, and I want to come to some of those. I am grateful always for his detailed replies.

Of course, the Office for Students did not get off to a very good start with our Foreign Secretary’s confidant being appointed to that board. The board has the title of Office for Students but does not seem to have students at the heart of what it does. It should have included somebody from the NUS and someone from further education.

Fear not for vice-chancellors, because the former chief lobbyist for vice-chancellors was appointed to the board. As one vice-chancellor recently put it, no doubt with a smile on his or her face, “For us, this is far better than having a former vice-chancellor on the board. We now have 130 vice-chancellors as our regulator”.

Six months ago, “Panorama”, which we have heard mentioned in the previous Statement, reported on some of the problems of higher education, particularly those of private colleges. I was quite hopeful that the Office for Students would deal with some of these issues. I have not been reassured. As for the responsibilities, it talks about a “light touch” in monitoring and self-regulation. It says:

“Further changes will make it quicker and simpler for new providers to enter the market, with an expectation that greater competition may mean some providers will exit”.


I do not want a light touch on some of these issues.

I have had several emails from various individuals who have attended a college. I am not going to name the college, but I want to give a flavour of this, and I am quite happy to hand these over to the Minister. One student says that the college charges money from students to forge their attendance record and to make assignments for them; the college makes fake timetables and uses names of its full-time staff members on the timetables in their ignorance and uses fake assessment schedules where names of staff members are used as assessors without their knowledge. The college charges students a proportion of their total student loan grant available to students in one year as a token of the college’s services to students, fakes pages and records on student assessments and uses the name of the Ministry of Defence and the RAF et cetera on its website in order to facilitate its dirty business. And so it goes on.

That really is not good enough. We talk about having the finest higher education system in the world, but practices like that do not help our reputation, and we need to do something about that. It cannot be just a light touch here and a light touch there. Proper action has to be taken.

I will turn to a few issues that I have also raised, such as essay mills. I moved an amendment on that to the Higher Education and Research Act and was assured that, if we could not get this under control, we would look at legislation. I was grateful for the Minister’s reply. He said—and I think it is important to put it out there—that he expects the Office for Students to encourage and support the sector to implement strong policies and sanctions to address this important issue in the most robust way possible. That gives me hope. Now that we have said that, we can come back in 12 months or so and see whether that has happened.

One of the issues we talk about is degrees of private colleges particularly being validated by our universities. Again I put a Question down about how the Government ensure that a consistent and professional level of external examiners appointed for degrees are validated by universities but not delivered by those universities. The Minister’s replied that these institutions are subject to a rigorous, risk-based approach to quality assurance. That did not happen at Greenwich College. Its degrees were validated by Plymouth University, which allowed the practices to go on. When those degrees were validated, I did not see that institution being subject to a rigorous, risk-based approach. Again, I hope that the Office for Students will tackle this issue properly. My noble friend Lady Garden and I have met the new chief executive of the Greenwich School of Management, which was the subject of that programme and where some of the most appalling practices were highlighted, and we were reassured by the approach that it is putting in place. We have been invited to visit the college in the summer.

Responsibility for equal opportunities is also conferred on the Office for Students. It is equal opportunities in its widest sense: equal opportunity of access for students from disadvantaged backgrounds and equal opportunities for young people with special educational needs. Some fantastic work is going in terms of special educational needs. I came across a student who had completed her first degree at Leeds University and was going on to do a master’s degree. She had mild cerebral palsy and some other issues as well. That university has been stunning in the support that it has given her. Sometimes, when we moan about things, it is right and proper that we highlight good practice as well. Perhaps the Office for Students can take good practice and ensure that other universities highlight it as well.

I shall now give some examples of bad practice—again, I have put a Question to the Minister about this. Let us imagine that a student from a deprived community manages to get to a top London university. They get a first; their family is so proud of them and the ceremony to award their degree comes about. Suddenly, that young person from a deprived community is charged £45 for each ticket for their family—that is on top of having to pay for their gown and their photograph. That is absolutely disgraceful. We are talking about a top London university. It should not happen. When I wrote to the vice-chancellor, I was told that it did not even have a bursary award to support students in such a situation.

When we were talking about TEF, I remember being concerned that we might see universities going down the road of schools and hanging out banners equivalent to those saying, “Ofsted regard us as an outstanding school”. The prediction came true, because I was driving past Hope University in Liverpool and nearly crashed the car when I saw banners hanging outside the university—incidentally, Hope University is the only ecumenical university in Europe—declaring: “Hope has got a gold standard”, with leaflets given out here and there.

At Second Reading of the higher education Bill, the Benches opposite were packed out. I think that I was the only person who did not declare an interest—there were vice-chancellors, former vice-chancellors, chancellors and masters. They are not here now. I thought at the time, “It’s a pity we haven’t got a student standing up, because we need to listen to students”. For students, universities are about getting a job, getting an experience and getting a qualification. I hope that the Office for Students will be plugged into students and will hear what students want loud and clear, because that is what it must be about.