Higher Education and Research Bill (First sitting)

Mark Pawsey Excerpts

Committee Debate: 1st sitting: House of Commons
Tuesday 6th September 2016 Public Bill Committees

[Carol Monaghan (Glasgow North West) (SNP)]

Q Professor Carter and Professor Gaskell said that student representation is important and beneficial. Can I ask you to give us a quick example of how student representation has been beneficial and why we should have it?

Professor Joy Carter: It is about not so much representation, but the holistic sense of student engagement, of which representation is a part. If I can answer the question from a more holistic perspective, in my own institution—to give you one example—we have a student fellows scheme. Students work in partnership with members of staff on projects of their choosing to enhance the quality of the higher education that they are receiving. At any one time in my institution we have got 60 to 100 of those enhancement projects—real partnerships between students and staff—going on. The quality of enhancement that is achieved is beyond measure.

[Mark Pawsey (Rugby) (Con)]

Q To ask a broader question, how important do you think this piece of legislation is, given that there has not been any legislation for more than 20 years? Which part of the Bill, from your perspective, is the most important?

Paul Kirkham: As an independent provider, working with a very fragmented regulatory system for many, many years has been an absolute nightmare, so having a simple, straightforward, single regulatory system is absolutely crucial. The most important part is that we have a level playing field whereby providers are treated equally and correctly.

Pam Tatlow: I think we should be looking at the Bill in a holistic way. There is a real risk that we look at the Bill in terms of a silo—the office for students, and then UK Research and Innovation. What we have got at the moment through the Higher Education Funding Council for England is some holistic oversight over the whole of the sector, in terms of reporting. Therefore, there are issues around OFS, and some of the hard corners need to be taken off the regulatory framework. We look at the Bill as a whole, because one impacts on the other. Teaching impacts on research and innovation, and vice versa.

[Mark Pawsey]

Q How important is the Bill?

Pam Tatlow: The Bill is very important because the Government want to table it. It would not have been our most immediate priority, but there are regulatory things that need to be sorted out, as colleagues to my left have pointed out. You can undertake the teaching excellence framework without this Bill—we should be clear about that—and HEFCE is already making preparations to do so. We do not necessarily need the Bill to deliver the Government’s commitment to teaching.

Gordon McKenzie: I agree with Mr Kirkham that the Bill is essential. It was essential from 2011, when the Government made substantial changes to the fee regime. I think it is important to look at the Bill holistically. The essential part is the creation of the office for students and the ability to regulate all providers on a fair and equal basis, whatever their background and history. I have concerns that, in the approach taken—having the office for students on the one hand and UKRI on the other—some of the benefits of having a single body looking at higher education as a whole might be lost, but there are perhaps ways around that.

[Roger Mullin]

Q In terms of the panel members who have already commented on the regulatory framework, some people have been criticising the proposals as being overly summative and not formative enough to enable or encourage proper development. Would you like to comment on that?

Professor Simon Gaskell: I will come to your question in a moment. I just want to say, in terms of the need for the Bill, that clearly it is essentially replacing the 1992 legislation, which was appropriate at the time, although the times were quite different then. The argument for an upgrading of the regulatory framework for higher education is compelling.

Of course, it has to be admitted that throughout the coalition Government we survived on, frankly, a series of fudges, which nevertheless enabled the out-of-date legislation to allow the sector to continue. So one could not say that the Bill is absolutely essential, but it does have some important tidying-up aspects. The importance of the Bill derives largely from a measure advocated by Universities UK, which was to have a single entry into the sector through a well described and well regulated register of higher education providers. Whether one calls that a “level playing field” or some other term, that is an important aspect.

If I understood the most recent question correctly, it asked whether the Bill might perhaps be too permissive rather than directive in terms of its content. We at Universities UK and in our member institutions do have concerns about that. There are some aspects of the wording of the Bill which could be interpreted to enable directions from the office for students, or indeed from the Department for Education, that would allow measures to be taken which we think would not be in the best interests of the sector. These may be allowed rather than prescribed by the Bill. We are very aware of the need to get the wording and the detail right to make sure that something which may not be immediately intended would not be allowed by incautious phrasing in the Bill.

--- Later in debate ---

[Mr Marsden]

Q May I put one further brief question to the panel? It relates to the new institutions that have been developed and the Bills around research: there has already been concern about the overlap of responsibilities between the new institutions and UKRI—UK Research and Innovation. The devolved Administrations have raised that as well. Is this an issue for the competition between English-only funding and UK funding, and the impact on the UK brand internationally?

Professor Sir Leszek Borysiewicz: I can only reflect back on my own time in the research councils and therefore the bearing that this has on the matter. There is a long-standing issue, which was identified in the Nurse review, of ensuring that there is an overall view and perspective taken of where the individual siloed research councils actually sit. There is a lot of sense in having a body that will scrutinise, and ensure that we can take a wider purview of the UK R and D effort. By R and D, I do not just mean science and technology. It is just as important for the humanities, bearing in mind that this is a major source of income for humanities research. There is a lot of sense in what is being proposed. The key things are always going to be the key things. How is this managed at an individual and personal level? You must not degrade the authority of individual research councils—you must make sure that those individuals have standing, because they are well recognised by the research community.

The addition of Innovate UK is welcome, because it means that industry and the translation to industry has skin in the game at the very basic level. That is really important, as is the proposal that Research England play a huge part in ensuring that we can sustain credible international competitiveness for the United Kingdom’s very enviable research position. So it looks quite good.

[Mark Pawsey]

Q Again, I would like to go the general and ask if you would tell us which are the most important parts of the Bill as far as you are concerned, and why the Bill is so important right now.

Professor Quintin McKellar: The Bill is important because we have had such a significant change in higher education over the past 20 years. We now have almost 50% of 19 to 23-year-olds going to university, which is a significant change from the situation that existed previously. Even more fundamental to our students is the fact that they are now paying through their tuition fees for that education, which creates a different relationship between universities and students—you might call them customers as well. That has changed significantly and I think that the Government’s idea to have an office for students that would primarily be interested in student wellbeing and the student experience is a good thing. Clearly, separating it from research presents some challenges; nevertheless, the idea of UKRI bringing together the majority of the research funding bodies within one remit is a good thing as long as the innovative part of that continues to be business-focused. The challenge might be linking the two and ensuring that there is commonality in membership so that the research activities continue to inform our teaching excellence, at undergraduate and postgraduate level.

[Mark Pawsey]

Q Are you happy with the Bill as it stands on that issue or would you like to see some form of change?

Professor Quintin McKellar: I do not know whether the Bill explicitly suggests that there will be commonality between UKRI and the OFS, but it might be helpful if it did.

[The Chair]

Does any other panel member wish to respond to Mr Pawsey?

Professor Sir Leszek Borysiewicz: We are broadly supportive of the recognition that the Government are giving to teaching in particular. That is really good, because for a long time the criticism has been that research gets a disproportionality to teaching. I also particularly like the implicit and explicit recognition of autonomy, as originally proposed by Robbins and Dearing, the fact that diversity in the sector is lauded and also that dual support is for the first time given real recognition for the work it does in supporting the sector.

The problems we see are brought on a little by Brexit and a little by the fact that the remits of research and teaching are now under two different Secretaries of State, so I would be looking for safeguards regarding the unity we were able to get, and in those safeguards I would be particularly looking at PhD students, because all the expertise for ensuring that there is a research environment will sit within the UKRI sector; it does not exist in the OFS sector, yet we note, for example, that higher degrees, which may be largely research-based, are going to sit with the OFS. There are some musts that need to be introduced in the Bill to ensure that there is absolute co-working between UKRI and the OFS in that area.

Sir Alan Langlands: The symbiotic relationship between teaching and research is central, and therefore the office for students and UKRI must collaborate. They need to have equal standing. It is not explicit, of course, but my sense is that UKRI is in the Bill as an independent organisation—a non-departmental public body—to advise Ministers, and the office for students is there to do what Ministers tell it to do. We have to be clear that they have equivalence. For example, the suggestion that was made by, I think, Universities UK, that UKRI provide advice to Ministers show flow to the office for students and be explicit.

My sense is that we have to be clear that the office for students is not just an instrument of Government but is an organisation that is reflecting back to Government the issues and the challenges facing the sector, and that balance has been hugely important since 1992 and has to be sustained.

[The Chair]

Q Ms Cook, do you wish to add anything?

Mary Curnock Cook: I would just say that from the UCAS point of view what we want to be able to do is make sure that students are very clear about what they are getting when they apply for higher education, what they are paying for through their loans or other means—

[Mark Pawsey]

Q Does the Bill make that more explicit? If so, does that help students who are applying to your organisation to understand more?

Mary Curnock Cook: I think it does and, in particular for us anyway, the register of providers, which sets out very clearly the status of each provider, is important, because a lot of providers want to be listed on UCAS, because it gives them a sort of credibility, and to be honest some of the providers who apply to us to use UCAS services are quite shocking in terms of how small they are, how parlous their finances are and so on. It will be very helpful for us to have that kind of regulatory support for who comes into the UCAS service.

[Dr Blackman-Woods]

Q One of the things that the Bill does is open up student data, including individual-level data, to a wider range of people, possibly taking the use of that data outside current research protocols. Do you see that as a problem and something that we should address as a Committee? Also, would it be helpful to have all the data in one place? There are lots of requirements on individual institutions to produce data, but would it be helpful to have all that data available in one place, for example in UCAS?

Mary Curnock Cook: Yes. We broadly welcome clauses 71 and 72, which require UCAS or potentially other organisations like UCAS to share admissions data for research purposes. Indeed, we have recently signed an agreement with the Administrative Data Research Network, and we will make a very large deposit of data going back to 2007, which will be available to researchers under clearly controlled conditions, including that they only have access to de-identified data, but then they can also link it to other administrative data sets.

We have proposed some amendments to the Bill because the Bill gives powers to the Secretary of State to provide those data from us or organisations like us to other parties, and we are very keen that that is done in a way that offers the same protections to students, particularly over their personal data. Some of the amendments that we have put forward suggest that it is made very clear that access to these data is for researchers and particularly only for public benefit.

UCAS is a charity and our trustees are concerned that UCAS should not have a sort of blank check available, such that data requests could be made on us at any time for multiple purposes, which would obviously increase our costs very considerably and those increased costs would inevitably have to be passed on to students and higher education providers.