Access to Postgraduate Study (Oxford University)

Lord Willetts Excerpts

Wednesday 23rd January 2013 Commons Chamber

[The Minister for Universities and Science (Mr David Willetts)]

I congratulate the right hon. Member for Salford and Eccles (Hazel Blears) on raising this issue. Let me immediately agree with her that it involves some very important wider issues, to which I shall turn shortly. I hope she will appreciate, however, that although she has spoken about her constituent Damien Shannon in conditions of parliamentary privilege—and I have read about him in the newspapers as well—a legal case is pending as a result of a dispute between him and the Oxford college concerned. It would be difficult for me to take up some of the specifics to which she referred, not just because there is to be a court hearing but because of a wider issue, namely the autonomy of our universities. That autonomy was most recently embodied in legislation passed by the last Government, which made clear that it was not for Parliament—or Government—to instruct universities on their admission policies. It is therefore hard for me to discuss the specific case of this individual and this university.

I do, however, completely understand the wider issues raised by the right hon. Lady. Let me begin by making it clear that postgraduate education is becoming far more important. There is an increasing range of jobs for which a postgraduate qualification is expected, and Alan Milburn was right to describe that as a growing challenge in the area of social mobility and the spreading of opportunity.

I began my career as a civil servant, entering the Treasury as a former undergraduate with a single degree, but most people who join the Treasury now probably have a postgraduate qualification. I am not sure that it has made the conduct of economic policy any better, but that is beside the point. The qualification levels among people entering those jobs and, indeed, many of the professions has changed in a generation, and that is the background to the wider debate about postgraduate qualifications.

I have followed the arguments about these matters very closely. In fact, in the past two and a half years we have hardly changed Government funding for postgraduate study. Notwithstanding all the controversy about our changes to undergraduate finance and despite the wider need for public expenditure control, we have been able—along with the Higher Education Funding Council—to sustain, broadly, past levels of funding for postgraduate education. HEFCE’s allocation for taught postgraduate provision is being maintained at about £135 million and it will provide about £235 million for postgraduate research degree supervision support, while the research councils will spend about £340 million on postgraduate research provision.

I occasionally read about reductions in support for postgraduate provision. In tough times we have been able to maintain that support, but because postgraduate qualifications are becoming increasingly important, the salience and significance of the debate about access to them becomes ever greater. That is why the right hon. Lady has raised the issue this evening, and, as I have said, I accept her point—and Alan Milburn’s point—that we must not erect a new barrier to the spread of opportunity.

[Hazel Blears]

I understand the limitations on what the Minister can say about the individual case, but is he at all concerned that 47% of people who apply to Oxford are unable to take up their places, despite having the academic qualifications, simply because they cannot raise the money up front?

[Mr Willetts]

I would be concerned if any people who had the ability to benefit from education at any level were not able to take that opportunity. I have just heard the figure that the right hon. Lady cites, having not previously been aware of it. Successive Governments have not been able to extend a general financial support to postgraduate students. I do not want to get into discussing cases of individual universities, but Oxford university argues that it understands the need for more scholarship support so that people are not debarred from postgraduate study at Oxford by financial pressures. My understanding is that in only the most recent few months it has raised £30 million in extra support. I heard, as I am sure hat the administration governing bodies at Oxford will have done, the right hon. Lady’s points about the case for scholarships linked to need and financial circumstances. However, successive Governments have so far not been able to offer a general Exchequer support for postgraduate students. No Government have even been able to offer a means-tested maintenance grant for these students. It is very hard for any Government to go straight into that.

Let me take the right hon. Lady through some of the wider arguments. First, like her, I have read the report by the Higher Education Commission—I have read several recent reports. I do not think I am breaking any confidence by saying that I recall being shadow Secretary of State, discussing this issue with the then Secretary of State, Lord Mandelson, as he now is, and urging that the terms of reference for the Browne review be drawn so broadly as to include postgraduate provision—I remember proposing that to him. The terms of reference for Browne would have made it possible for Browne to make proposals for postgraduate provision, but Browne rather ducked the issue. He focused on these very old proposals on undergraduate provision, and all he said on postgraduates was that the situation needed to be monitored. We of course came into government and received the conclusions from the report, which the previous Government had commissioned. By and large—not perfectly—we acted on those provisions, including by asking Adrian Smith, who was then a senior official in the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills and is now at HEFCE, to monitor what is happening to postgraduate education. This matter was covered by the terms of reference for the inquiry that Labour set up and we have complied with the proposals from that report on monitoring the situation, but Browne was not able to crack the wider problem.

[Hazel Blears]

One of the rewards for winning a general election is that people move from opposition into government, so the Minister is now perfectly well placed to put into action the plans he had when he was in opposition. Will he grasp that opportunity and do so?

[Mr Willetts]

And of course one of the rewards of going from government into opposition is that people can call for proposals that they were never able to afford or deliver while they were in government, so it works both ways.

I am open-minded on this issue. I accept that there are genuine concerns about social mobility, as expressed by Alan Milburn and others. I can see postgraduate qualifications becoming increasingly important. I am following with great interest the debate that has been launched with several different reports—the Higher Education Commission report is one but I want to touch on several others, too—on how our financing system could be changed to assist people into postgraduate provision.

[Mr Lammy]

Does the Minister recognise the urgency of the issue, given the changing nature of our economy? Students now need postgraduate education far more than previously and are also unlikely to have the money. At the same time, the sector has become truly global. As my right hon. Friend the Member for Salford and Eccles (Hazel Blears) has shown, the feeling is that institutions such as Oxford are more keen to take overseas students with the cash than local British students. The figures show that British students are losing out in these circumstances. That is why we need to grasp the problem, although I recognise that that is difficult.

[Mr Willetts]

I agree with the right hon. Gentleman, who has experience of this area in government, about the importance of the global issue. I appreciate that both right hon. Members have rightly focused on the wider social mobility issue and neither has tried to claim that the changes to undergraduate finance are the problem. Of course, the monthly and annual repayments of student loans for undergraduates will fall under our new arrangements, so that is not the issue. Regardless of what is happening in undergraduate education, the debate is much more about social mobility and the changing economic scene.

I welcome the interventions from several groups of experts. We have had the Higher Education Commission report that has been mentioned and an ingenious proposal from Tim Leunig of the CentreForum. Even the NUS, which in other contexts is against the loan and repayment scheme, has called for a postgraduate loan scheme, which is what I think the right hon. Lady was calling for. There are risks as well as attractions in that approach, and the biggest single risk is that as soon as we had a general public expenditure programme or loans scheme, the Treasury would immediately become interested in how many people were eligible, controlling postgraduate numbers and setting new conditions. It would be a great pity if this open and diverse sector found itself with a highly regulated loan scheme that constrained its growth.

I do not accept and have not been persuaded at this stage that a Government-funded loan scheme is the answer, but I am happy to consider that proposal and others if people make them.

[Hazel Blears]

The Minister has said that he values the openness and diversity of the postgraduate sector. How diverse can it be when the requirement is to have £21,000 cash immediately available to pay up front? Is that not an issue that narrows the sector through selection by wealth rather than academic merit?

[Mr Willetts]

I fully understand that we cannot afford the sheer waste of talent if people who can benefit from any level of education do not participate. As well as the fairness argument, there is an efficiency argument and when fairness and efficiency point the same way, it leads to a clear recognition on both sides of the House of what must be done.

We have now had the opportunity offered by the Browne report, which led simply to a proposal on monitoring, which HEFCE is doing. We have also had several interesting proposals from outside bodies. Only this afternoon, I spent two hours at HEFCE at a seminar on postgraduate finance that it organised to go through the possible options. Of course, I realise that some of the proposals are for loan schemes and there are other ideas, too. I want more career development loans to be taken up and I follow the figures with great interest, as I am keen to see whether there are barriers to people taking up such loans. I am not commenting on the specific case that was mentioned, and I do not know whether that option was investigated, but it is an important way of getting support and I welcome it.

I am also very interested in whether universities, by fundraising and using links to alumni, can find ways of delivering needs-blind admissions to their postgraduate courses. This is a very good moment for the right hon. Lady to have called this debate as there are a range of ideas out there. All I can undertake is that I will carry on considering them. If anything looks to me to be well targeted and affordable at a time when public money is tight, I undertake to consider it very sympathetically. As yet, no idea has been proposed that meets all those criteria and we must be wary of extending the hand of Treasury control to postgraduate education, a sector that has hitherto not experienced that.

The only other point I want to make in the limited time that is left is to stress that we will explore proposals made in the studies involving employers, universities and banks. We are keen to have those conversations and I am absolutely—