Higher Education and Research Bill

Debate between Lord Storey and Baroness Blackstone

Committee: 5th sitting (Hansard): House of Lords
Monday 23rd January 2017 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Blackstone (Lab)]

My Lords, I find myself in agreement with the noble Lord. There is a slight danger that this will become a club of former higher education Ministers. However, as a vice-chancellor and former Minister, I found that the National Student Survey was a rather useful device—in a rather broad-brush way, admittedly—for telling us something about what students perceive about their own experience as undergraduates. It is not done for graduate students. I am somewhat at loggerheads with my noble friend Lord Lipsey, and I am sorry about this because normally we agree on many things. I would say that a 70% response rate that—if I understand correctly—my noble friend was quoting to be unacceptable, is a rather high response rate in most surveys of this kind. It is sometimes possible to do deep dives and find out a bit more about the group that had not responded to see whether they are in any way different in their views or backgrounds. I had not read the critique that he quotes by the ONS and the RSS. It is important that the Minister comes back and tells us whether the Government have looked at those criticisms. If not, why not, and will they in future?

I have a lot of concerns about the TEF and how it should be done. The Government are taking on a very difficult and complex task. I am not sure whether they realise how difficult it is to get reliability and validity in the responses provided. I look forward to hearing what Professor Chris Husbands, who has a lot of expertise on this, will say. I would also like to hear his response to the criticisms and comments of the ONS and RSS.

We cannot entirely take out and ignore what the NSS tells us about students’ experience. There is only a small number of questions about teaching, but there are some. There are many other questions about things that are relevant to the successful completion of their courses, including how they are assessed and examined. I hope we can look at this in a bit more depth and not completely rule out the contribution that a rethought NSS can make to any assessments of how our universities, and departments within them, are teaching, and whether it meets the kind of quality that we expect it to meet.

[Lord Storey (LD)]

I shall speak to Amendment 197, which would ensure that the TEF has to be reassessed before it is introduced. We welcome a focus on teaching. It is vital that any student in a higher education establishment gets the highest level of teaching. Given the fees they pay, it is not acceptable for students to be in a lecture of more than 100 students where the lecturer is unable to inspire or inform those students. It is not acceptable to have the practices that go with poor teaching, whether it be poor marking of dissertations and essays, or late return of those pieces of work. Teaching quality has to be at the heart of the university experience for young people.

Our concern is that employment outcomes do not give an insight into teaching excellence, nor does retention. We have had this discussion on previous amendments. I am not totally averse to a student survey—it is about the questions that it asks. If it asked questions that challenged the student to think properly about their teaching experience, about how they were challenged and how the subject was put across to them, rather than easy tick-box answers, that would be a proper student survey. The student survey would have to be a very small part of the metrics.

As I said, Amendment 197 would ensure that the TEF has to be reassessed before it is introduced. It follows an amendment tabled by Paul Blomfield in the Commons on Report. He stated:

“Amendment 50 reflects concern over the reliability of the metrics used to measure teaching excellence”.


He emphasised many times in Committee, that,

“we all welcome the Government’s focus on teaching excellence, and we can all work effectively together on the principle of the teaching excellence framework. However, the metrics on employment outcomes, on retention and on the national student satisfaction survey have been identified by the Government themselves as a proxy for teaching excellence.

The amendment simply seeks to add to the Bill a requirement that the metrics used by the Government to determine teaching quality should have a demonstrable link to teaching excellence. This was the unanimous recommendation of the then Business, Innovation and Skills Committee … We all agree that employment outcomes do not necessarily demonstrate teaching excellence. There are also enormous regional variations in employment outcomes and salary levels. The Minister will know that someone who comes from the right family and goes to the right school and university could have an awful teaching experience but still get a decent job. The converse is also true. People who do not come from the right family and who do not go to what many see as the right university could have an excellent teaching experience but not command such high salary levels. So employment outcomes are a crude and almost perverse proxy measure of teaching excellence. I would therefore welcome the Minister’s observations on why this simple amendment to introduce a demonstrable link between the metrics and teaching excellence would not strengthen the Bill and will not be accepted by the Government”.—[Official Report, Commons, 21/11/16; cols. 626-27.]