Lifelong Learning (Higher Education Fee Limits) Bill (First sitting)

Matt Western Excerpts

Committee stage
Tuesday 21st March 2023 Public Bill Committees

[Robert Halfon]

Q Given what you say about HTQs, and level 4 and 5, do you foresee much greater collaboration between universities and further education colleges once the lifelong loan entitlement is up and running?

Professor Press: There will have to be, otherwise people will leave just with a series of certificates. The challenge is that employers will find it difficult to understand what those things mean. The lifelong loan entitlement provides an opportunity to build up micro-credentials and to stack them into qualifications, and that really matters. That will require collaboration between institutions, whether they are further education or higher education.

[Matt Western (Warwick and Leamington) (Lab)]

Q Good morning, professor. I will start with questions about the funding model for higher education institutions. What impact do you think the introduction of the lifelong loan entitlement and the proposed funding model in the Bill will have on higher education providers, particularly given the declining unit of resource?

Professor Press: I think the LLE will open up opportunities for part-time learners, and that is to be welcomed enormously. The unit of resource is fixed, as we know. You might come on to ask me about this, but the bit I find most difficult to understand is the difference between the credit-based and the fixed-mechanism methods of calculating the fee cap. I hope you will ask me a question about that; I think that needs a bit of clarification. However, the sector will continue to face challenges when it comes to delivering at quality, given that the fee cap is frozen. Nevertheless, the opportunity to open up learning to new groups of students is welcome, and will be beneficial to business and the country.

[Matt Western]

Q Do you mind expanding on that difference between credit-based and fixed fees, for the benefit of us around the table?

Professor Press: As I understand it—forgive me if I have got this wrong—it is up to the Secretary of State to decide which method will apply. My understanding of what the Bill is trying to do is this: in a sense, we should enable any credit to be costed at a credit fee’s cost, and it should be up to the providers to assess whether there is demand and supply—a demand for the learning at credit level—and whether, if that is opened up, businesses and employers will want to recognise the value of that. At the moment, it feels like a slightly false divide, and it leaves the decision as to what can and cannot be offered in a modular way to the Secretary of State. That is how I have understood it, but if I have got that wrong, I apologise.

[Matt Western]

Q May I pick up on the point raised by the Minister about collaboration between institutions, whether that is between FE and HE, or laterally, between HE and HE or FE and FE? You are in Manchester; you have a good cluster there. Do you think that this might work better in metropolitan, urban areas, but be much more difficult for a coastal or town-based FE college in a wider, open, more remote landscape?

Professor Press: For modular learning that is purely attendance-based, yes, I think you are right. I think it will be easier to operationalise in places such as Greater Manchester, and I suppose part of the learning that we will get as the LLE is phased in is an understanding of the obstacles that might exist. Then perhaps we can work out ways of addressing those in areas where there is not a large cluster of HE and FE providers. Of course, the largest university in the country is the Open University, and I think we have to think more flexibly about either blended or digital learning. There may be opportunities for institutions that are not clustered in the way that they are here in Manchester to take full advantage of partnerships.

[Matt Western]

Q So you would support remote learners being covered by this?

Professor Press: I would, because I think we should focus on the outcomes for learners, rather than the inputs to the learning.

[Sir David Evennett (Bexleyheath and Crayford) (Con)]

Q Good morning, Professor Press. We are grateful to you for being with us today. I have two questions. First, do you think this approach is exciting for universities and offers real opportunities for advance? Secondly, what administrative challenges do you foresee for your university arising from the introduction of this approach and the courses offered?

Professor Press: Those are great questions. I really do think it is exciting, because it provides learners with the opportunity to study in a different way, and the more we can do to encourage people to focus on their professional development, the better it will be for our businesses and employers across the country.

The key challenge, I think, will be around the information, advice and guidance that people get about what the opportunity is, particularly for adult learners, who may not be in institutions that are used to providing that sort of careers guidance. That will be a particular challenge for any institution. Who is responsible for doing all of that? There will be many partners responsible for doing that, and that really does matter.

The challenges for my university—I am answering as vice-chancellor, rather than as a UUK representative—will be the mechanics of how we do all this. We are used to recruiting, admitting, onboarding, educating and supporting with pastoral care students who come mostly for three or four-year programmes. We will have to evolve ways of doing that for students who come for 30-credit—or multiple 30-credit—modules. There will be an additional cost of doing that, so we will need to work out what we can offer that can be delivered sustainably, given the cost base. That means that there will need to be a sufficient supply of students wanting to take a particular module, and a demand from the workplace for those students to achieve a successful outcome. We will look very carefully at what we offer. This gives us a chance to tailor our provision to local demand from employers. It is not without its challenges, but it is an exciting prospect.

--- Later in debate ---

[Dan Jarvis (Barnsley Central) (Lab)]

Q I was interested to hear what you said about the link to local businesses, and you mentioned the city council. I am particularly interested in the skills and educational landscape at regional level. Greater Manchester is one of two trailblazer mayoral combined authorities; the other is the West Midlands. What is your sense of the role for the Mayor and the mayoral combined authority in all this?

Professor Press: In Greater Manchester, we have a civic university agreement between the five higher education providers and the Greater Manchester Combined Authority. We work very closely together. The proposed legislation gives us the opportunity to align much more closely what we can provide and the sorts of skills that the combined authority wishes to deliver, because of the benefit there will be to local businesses and employers. I am very positive about working with the combined authority. The key thing to note is that the relationships are good, the conversations take place and people know one another. That builds trust and confidence and enables us to have the right sorts of conversations that deliver positive outcomes.

[Matt Western]

Q Professor, could we come back to the financial implications and the administrative side of delivering this in institutions? Could you expand on how you think it will work? How much additional resource might be required in the delivery of short-length courses versus the traditional model for a higher education institution?

Professor Press: I have not done the modelling and am not sure whether anyone else has yet, but there will be an additional cost from doing this. It is clear that that is bound to be the case. If people are taking, for instance, four 30-credit modules rather than one level 4 or 5 programme, there will be onboarding and exiting costs associated with the student four times over compared with just once. As you will appreciate, Matt, universities spend a lot of time, effort and money on inducting, familiarising, briefing and onboarding students. We would have to do that every time a new student came to study a 30-credit module.

There will also be the costs and complexities associated with the production of the certificates, and if credit transfers were to take place with other organisations. It is going to be costly. I do not know what the exact costs are, so I am sorry but I am unable to answer your question in a quantitative way.

[Matt Western]

Q I understand that, and I do not think you are alone in not having done the modelling. I guess if you are talking about a 30-credit module versus a traditional year of, say, 120 credits, it would not necessarily be four times the administrative burden. It will not be four times 30, but it could be three times or two times or something like that. Do you think that is a reasonable assumption?

Professor Press: It would depend on whether a student is a returning student or in a new body of students, and on their particular needs. Some students will benefit from this. Thinking particularly about our local context, something like half our students here at Manchester Met are the first in their family to come to university, about a third of them come from families with parental incomes of below £25,000, and about a third are from black, Asian or minority ethnic communities where they had other responsibilities, such as working or care.

We put a lot of effort into supporting these students. We put millions into our student hardship fund to help these students. There are all sorts of other complexities in addition to the technical aspects, including onboarding and those types of things that cost universities money. We invest in our students because we believe in their futures. It is much more complicated than a simple “three times” or “two times” kind of numerical argument. I am going to have to go away and do some work on that.

[The Chair]

Given our time constraints, we have time for just one quick last question.

--- Later in debate ---

[Robert Halfon]

Q I think there will be a one-to-one service for those students, which is part of the Government service that exists already, but absolutely. I very much hope that not just UCAS but the National Careers Service, which we are doing a lot on, will have an important role in directing students to the training and retraining options that they might want to consider.

Do you not think that good employers will welcome this? We know that there is often not as much investment in training as they would like, but now students will be able to access short courses and modules, rather than having to do long courses. As you know, they will also have 12 entry points, rather than just four, throughout the year, which will make a difference. It may actually be that employers think this is a good idea and that a lot more employees are trained and retrained in the skills that employers need.

Ellen Thinnesen: I agree with you, actually. I think, from both an employer perspective and a further education college perspective, that it will allow greater agility to be able to meet the changing skills needs that are required. In Sunderland College, for example, we are evolving quite rapidly into electrification, but it is currently incredibly difficult to respond with agility and at pace in relation to the technical skills training needs that are required.

I do think we should be very careful, because the devil is always in the detail. We know that the Learning and Work Institute reported that employer investment in skills has fallen by 28% in real terms since 2005. We need to be really careful, as we culturally drive this change, that factors such as that are taken into account.

[Matt Western]

Q Thank you, Ellen. I am afraid you are very much the centre of our attention for the time being. I will ask specifically about quality, as I understand that you have a certain expertise in its delivery and measurement. How are we going to ensure that there is a consistent measure of quality across courses and providers with the LLE?

Ellen Thinnesen: That is a big question, and there are a number of answers to it. First, being very clear about what a credit is and what a student can expect to receive in that module—that credit—of learning is incredibly important. We know that the current system sets out the direct learning per credit that a student can expect to receive, as well as the demands on their indirect study time. We know that in the current system, as a student, you can go to two different but similar higher education providers that are delivering very similar modules. What you get in direct and indirect learning can vary considerably within that offer. So in the first instance, the publication of clear information for students about credits and what they can expect to receive in that module in teaching and learning is really important.

A significant amount of work needs to happen in colleges on the continued quality assurance of modulised study. For example, in a college, if we are to quality assure the teaching and learning, we will pay a visit to that programme to assess how well academic standards are being delivered. The quality of that provision to students becomes incredibly difficult and the logistics increase significantly when modules are happening across a year at any given time.

[Matt Western]

Q Should the Bill have written into it some sort of definition of what a credit is?

Ellen Thinnesen: My personal and professional opinion is that it should. If we are defining fee limits attached to credits, it is really important to communicate to a student what a credit means. Essentially, a student wants to know a number of things. First, how much is this going to cost me? Secondly, what will I have to expend in effort and energy to complete this module? Thirdly, what will I get for that module and those credits from the institution that I am choosing to go to? So transparency about the relationship of credit to fees, and of credit to module content and what is expected within that, is very important.

[The Chair]

Q Thank you. Before any further questions, I ask Liz Bromley and Alun Francis to introduce yourselves—in your case, Alun, reintroduce yourself—for the record, please.

Alun Francis: Apologies, everyone, for the technical hitch. I am Alun Francis, the principal and chief executive of Oldham College.

--- Later in debate ---

[Brendan Clarke-Smith]

Q Thank you. Ellen?

Ellen Thinnesen: You may be aware that colleges currently submit their data via something called the ILR—the individualised learner record—which is a piece of software that we use across the sector. That software allows us to submit data returns in an academic year. Obviously, with the implementation of credits, and a course year, that would require a change. The college systems will enable that to happen because we are able to adjust the years of start and end dates within our academic year returns.

The consequence of that, around the course year, will be in relation to the greater requirement regarding data management and monitoring, which is quite substantial. There will be hundreds and thousands more entries for students studying on credit-based provision on a college’s ILR data return.

[Matt Western]

Q Thanks very much; it is good to have you all on the call this morning. Thanks for joining us. This is really aimed at Liz and Alun: how might employer demand be measured in deciding what courses should be initially rolled out under this new system? We will start with you, Liz.

Liz Bromley: I think that employers are learning that they have a much more proactive role to play with the further education sector now, as we have moved towards local skills improvement plans and working with employers to deliver the right qualifications to deliver the skills that they need. I think that that is another conversation as part of this journey.

I am a great supporter of the principles of this Bill in its entirety. Flexibility for the learner, lifelong learning and smaller bites of learning? Absolutely. However, as I think you would expect, I am almost always focused on, “Well, where is this going to be difficult to implement?”

I suppose that my nervousness is about employer engagement. The good employers will see it as a real opportunity to enable their workforce to better themselves educationally, to give them time off to help them do that, and perhaps to co-fund some elements of the module. It will be great. They will work with the colleges and the universities, and it will fly. Where you have less scrupulous employers, I can see this as a really good opportunity to shift the burden of paying for continuing professional development from the employer on to employees, who may wish to better themselves and therefore take out a loan.

Again, it goes back to giving IAG—information, advice and guidance—to the student but also to the employer, to ensure that nobody is exploited and the qualifications that come onstream in the pilot phase will demonstrably have an impact for the employer and for employees who are developing themselves while working and learning.

[Robert Halfon]

Q Could I start with Alun Francis? It was good to visit your college a few weeks ago; I had a wonderful visit. What do you think, in terms of FE, about the impact of the LLE encouraging disadvantaged students—particularly those from low-income backgrounds—to take up the LLE? What impact will it have on colleges such as yours?

Alun Francis: Thank you, and thank you for coming to visit us; it was a very enjoyable visit. We see this as part of a package of reforms. Just to give the context, Oldham is an extremely deprived area. Nearly 80% of our learners come from the bottom 20% of deprived boroughs. The level of English and maths on entry is one of the lowest in the country. We do not have a big private sector economy. That all sets the context in which we work, and different colleges will have different contexts. It is important to say that.

I think that we see this as part of a set of reforms that help to rebuild the opportunities for those who do not want to, or cannot, follow the route to university at 18 or 19, which has almost become the default route for higher skills. What we have seen is the collapse in that period of part-time learning and the old HNC/HND route. These are all parts of the process of rebuilding that.

There are issues. The point was made very well about where the balance will lie in whether the learner or the employer will pay for higher skills, but we see this as an important way of opening up people’s choice when coming back into learning. There is an issue about the balance between these routes and the workplace routes of apprenticeships and the levy—for SMEs funded through other means. We believe that a significant number of adults want the choice to come back into learning—perhaps after having a family or other gap, or having done some low-skilled work and now wanting to improve their skills—and traditionally we have offered them foundation degrees or degrees. This allows us to offer them a wider variety of choices, and we think there is demand for that.

It will take time for the market to grow. It is not a quick hit. It needs good information, advice and guidance. People need to know with confidence that what they are paying for is worth the loan. That is why sorting out the credits and engaging employers, so they know they are getting qualifications that are worth it, is of absolute importance. Addressing those three issues will make this work best, but I do think there is demand. We have a significant number of adults who do not want to or cannot go back to university for the full three years. Without this approach, opportunities will not be open to them. It is much more difficult than we imagine. While this approach will not solve the whole problem, it will help to solve a considerable part of it.

--- Later in debate ---

[The Chair]

Q We now have Professor Sir Edward Peck on the line as well. Would you like to introduce yourself for the record, Sir Edward?

Professor Peck: Yes, sorry about that slight technical challenge. My name is Professor Edward Peck; I have not yet been knighted—but, of course, you live in hope.

[Matt Western]

It’s on the record!

[The Chair]

That’s twice today. I call the Minister.

--- Later in debate ---

[Robert Halfon]

Q You have a close relationship with the Mansfield college. I want to understand how you think the LLE will impact both on HE and FE and also in terms of franchising to other institutions, as in the way that you are doing.

Professor Peck: We have a very close relationship, whereby we do all the training and education for level 4 and above for the people of Mansfield and Ashfield and the college does level 3 and below. That means we can design the programmes in the college to have really easy pathways of progression from level 3 to level 4 and, in future, we will start promoting the options around modular provision in the programmes we already run at Mansfield, in things like computing, construction management and those sorts of areas, where there is a real demand for skills.

If I can give you one example, we are seeing really high uptake in a level 4 course we are running in retrofit green construction. There is a massive demand. Eighty per cent. of the houses that we will live in in 2050 are already built, and the challenge is to retrofit them to be greener and more energy efficient. We do not have a workforce to do that. We now have a level 4 course in Mansfield where you can study that particular skill and, in future, you will be able to study it on a modular basis, which will open it up to a greater range of people who do not want to study that particular course full-time.

[Matt Western]

Q Hello Professor—good to see you. Likewise, I was very impressed by Mansfield when I came to visit. I am just interested to know your thoughts on the rationale of having a minimum of 30 credits. Do you think we should be considering a lower threshold?

Professor Peck: It is a challenge we faced on the Augar review, when we considered what the credit basis should be of a lifelong loan entitlement. Thirty credits hits a compromise between having a level of granularity where the Student Loans Company can give and administer loans for both fees and maintenance, and the bitesize learning that people are going to want to do. Thirty credits is notionally 300 hours of learning. I think it is the best compromise to start off with between those two different pressures that drive in different directions—the SLC to make it bigger, and maybe some of the requirements of learners for more bitesized learning to make it smaller. I think it is one of those things where we should just see how it rolls out as we implement and then change it if it seems like we have not quite got the balance right.

[Matt Western]

Q Okay. I know that in Canada, for example, they offer 10, don’t they? That seems to be quite successful.

Professor Peck: Yes. You can bundle them, actually, can’t you? You can sign up for three 10-credit modules. It is slightly clunkier than the Canadian system, but again, I think it will give people a chance to do smaller bitesize modules without having to take a loan out for every 10 credits, which I think would stretch the capacity of the Student Loans Company. I heard my colleague talking about transaction costs. If you start to get down to 10 credits per module, the transaction costs of recruiting the student, inducting them and so on gets quite large in relation to the fee you might get, so there is an economy of scale for providers around 30 credits as well.

[Matt Western]

Q Finally, can I just ask you about the future of the apprenticeship levy? It is currently not written into, or not within, this legislation. How do you see that sitting alongside the lifelong loan entitlement and the role for employers?

Professor Peck: Yes; I do think many employers will make use of the modular learning that the lifelong loan entitlement will promote. I think many employers will pay for their staff to do some of this upskilling and reskilling as part of investment in their training more broadly, which takes place outside the levy. I think there are some challenges at the moment about the levy and its size, aren’t there? We might be getting to a point where much of the levy is now being committed around apprenticeships, which is a real success. The question is: how do we keep apprenticeships growing over the next five to 10 years? That is for a very different group of staff. Apprenticeships often are for new starters or people completely changing their career with an employer, whereas the LLE is about modules enabling people to upskill and reskill when they are already in the workforce and established in the workforce.

[Lloyd Russell-Moyle]

Q At the moment, students come and study part-time or via the workplace. Predominantly, who pays for those courses?

Professor Peck: It is a really mixed picture. Some are paid for by employers and some will be paid for by individuals who have the means to do so. Those are the two major sources that we currently accept.

--- Later in debate ---

[Mr Perkins]

Q Clearly, success partly depends on the number of institutions at which students will be able to access these courses. Rachel, will you spell out the incentives for higher education institutions to put on courses in a much more bite-sized model, and the barriers to them doing so?

Rachel Sandby-Thomas: I am glad you raised that because I think there are obstacles. I am not saying this to obstruct the policy; I am actually trying to be constructive. It will introduce a lot more complexity into the higher education system, both for the students and for the institutions, and at lots of levels. It will kick off with uploading the courses on to the UCAS site. That might not seem complex, but the modules, how they all fit together and how they potentially fit with other institutions’ modules will actually be complex. Then, it is about how we market that clearly, because as was said, rightly, communicating clearly with prospective students is key to the success of the system.

There will need to be a lot of advice and guidance given to prospective students, who will want to know whether their prior learning will be taken into account and whether what they have done before and are proposing to do will actually form a coherent structural programme that will be recognised. You will then have the admissions. We hope that there will be a greater volume of admissions, but each of those admissions will have to be looked at very carefully on an individual basis, because of the matters of recognising prior learning and so on.

Data is another big and complex area. At the moment, the Data Futures programme is trying to get rid of the need to return data on modules, whereas this will obviously need the return of data on modules. There is a tension there that needs to be resolved. I could easily see it going into an extra framework of data returns, so that will be an issue. There is a big issue with the student information technical services, called SITS—I was going to say “fondly called”, except it is not—which is very much programmed on a system’s architecture, which is based on programmes that comprise modules, but is at that programme level. That will have to be completely refigured, which will be timely and costly.

Of course, you then have the issue of services and all the wraparound support services that we offer students, which will see an increase in volume. There are also tricky issues about how long students will have access to them. Do we know when they leave the university; how do we know when they go elsewhere for university; and do they have some sort of associated student status for a while? None of us knows the answers, but they are all things that need to be worked out. I say this because there is little by way of incentive for a business case at the moment. While I completely understand—going back to the first question—not wanting to provide a disincentive for students to do a modular course, there is a business disincentive in terms of the cost to the higher education institutions, unless they are already doing lots of modular provision.

[Matt Western]

Rachel, I am keen to understand how you see this fitting within the current regulatory landscape for higher education, particularly in the light of what it is fair to describe as an increased regulatory burden on the sector in recent years.

Rachel Sandby-Thomas: I think there will have to be differentiation between the two systems. There are quite a lot of concepts in the current OfS regulatory system that sit unhappily with this new system. For example, the concept of the completion of an award is key to the current system, but of course a student might not be completing an award as such when they are doing a module at one’s institution, so that needs to be changed. In the current degree system, there is quite an emphasis, for perfectly understandable reasons, on continuation and the importance of having a student continue for a year from the beginning of the course. Quite a lot of judgment is implied in that continuation being a good thing, whereas actually whether or not a student completes a module within or outside a year is a neutral thing, judgment-wise, in a modularised approach.

We also have the question of who will “own” the student in terms of graduate outcomes. Who can claim success, or to whom can success be attributed? I am reminded of that lovely quote of how success has many fathers, but failure is an orphan. I think there might well be many fathers for these students. Again, none of these things is insurmountable by any means, but they all need to be thought about in an intelligent manner.

[Matt Western]

Q Who do you think is best placed to be providing the advice and guidance? Is it down to the individual institutions, or is there a role for the OfS?

Rachel Sandby-Thomas: I do not think it should necessarily be the OfS, because that is not its area of expertise. This is really tricky. An institution can do some advice and guidance, and obviously, if a student is going to do all of the modules within an institution, that is comparatively simple. It is trickier when it is inter-institutional, which is the purpose and intention behind this.

On an individual basis, when a prospective student comes, there will be quite a lot of work for the university looking at what that student has already got and their prior learning, recognising it, and seeing how it might fit into one of their degrees or whatever. However, in a way that does not help the student very much at the beginning of the journey, because they might well have embarked on a kind of pick and mix, which might not amount to something that will end with a degree, if that is what the student wants. I do think that there is a sector-wide gap in terms of information, advice and guidance, and I think it is completely key to get that right for the success of this policy.

[Matt Western]

Q Sir David, may I put to you a question that has been put to previous witnesses about the funding situation across the sector? Given that you have worked in the Department for Education and also given your role today, what do you see as the risks to the sector in terms of an additional financial burden?

Sir David Bell: Rachel has articulated very clearly some of the additional costs that will come to the sector. There is also a question, going back to the issue of demand, about this kind of course. Some of the questions that we always ask ourselves at institutional level when we are asked to put on new programmes are: what is the demand, what are the costs of implementation, and what is the likely return? We have to think in that way. I think this is why the focus on careers information, guidance, pathways and so on will be very important, because if I might use a Scottish-ism here, I think the case for demand is not proven.

[Matt Western]

Q Sorry to cut across you. I think that Lord Johnson—Jo Johnson—was calling for a further pilot. Do you think that would have been a good idea?

Sir David Bell: The risk is, of course, that you pilot and you pilot and you pilot, and you never get there; you never get to the destination, as it were. We are part of the Department’s pilot on a higher technical qualification, and that will be one of those courses presumably that would be subsumed in the period between, say, 2024-25 up to 2027. So it will be quite interesting to see how that works.

The problem we have, and I think that goes back to something that Rachel said, is that we will be operating this at considerable scale, because if we are going to do that modularisation and upload it all and make it all available, that is a really big job. It is a big technical job, but I am also worried, ironically, about choice. I am slightly concerned that people are overwhelmed by choice of modules and other kinds of study.

We also know from our previous experience—one might say our current experience—that asking careers or guidance professionals to be absolutely up to speed with new qualifications or new routes to qualifications is quite a task, and therefore there is a big training and development opportunity requirement for people who are going to be advising those who might want to follow this more modular route.

[Matt Western]

Q Thank you. I have a specific question, perhaps for you, Sir David. We heard a moment ago from Ellen Thinnesen from Sunderland College, and she was talking about just how well the college works not only with the university, but also with the Department for Work and Pensions and so on. In terms of what this Bill might offer, it is about getting people back into work by reskilling, retraining them and so on, which is terrific. However, in the Bill we are looking at a cut-off at age 60—I speak personally now—so do you think that, given the fact that retirement ages are getting later and later, that should be more flexible, or higher?

Sir David Bell: I am not sure whether I am required to declare an interest in this matter as well. [Laughter.]

[Matt Western]

As much as me!

Sir David Bell: It is a really interesting question, and I must say that that is one of the things that slightly surprised me about the cut-off. There has been a lot of debate recently about trying to encourage more people back into the workplace post 50. And I would have thought that the opportunities afforded by the LLE would be ideal for people who might have trained in one area and then, later in life, decided they want to do something else. A module would be absolutely the right size of qualification for them, so I wonder whether that is something that could be thought about.

I mean, it’s that old cliché that 70 is the new 50, as it were. So I think there is probably some consideration worth giving to that 60-to-70 age range, because I think we will see more and more people, for one reason or another, continuing in employment. And if they continue in employment, presumably they will want to continue to upskill and enhance their qualifications.

[Katherine Fletcher]

Q This is a very interesting debate. In terms of being overwhelmed by choice, perhaps I could start with ladies first again, but I would like both of your opinions. Is there a bigger role for employers? If I am bowling along and I have decided that my biology degree is not relevant to being an MP and I want to get a level 4, 5 or 6 qualification to be an MP—I look forward to that training course, by the way—I will come along, but I will be doing it because I am trying to gain a qualification that either helps me with existing employment or that helps me to gain new employment.

I am interested in what you will do to engage with employers, so that rather than people being overwhelmed by choice there are pathways that kind of say: “If you get to this level”—is that something that can be set out in advance? Also, are you set up to then track outcomes? That is, this suggested pathway has taken 20 people through it, and 20 people have gone on to work with Jaguar Land Rover, even when they were not employees, having gained this qualification. Is that something that you are set up to do—almost to narrow the choice of modularisation to aid industry?

Rachel Sandby-Thomas: We do a lot of work with employers, and we work with them a lot on degree apprenticeships, as you would expect, but, especially in our business school and in our Warwick Manufacturing Group, we work with employers to design courses that will be good for them. That would just be a variation on that. We would track the learning outcomes, as we call them. Again, that sits slightly oddly with this modularisation, but again, it should be able to be worked through. Those learning outcomes pertain to the student and the student’s progression. We do track the students, partly because they are our alumni and partly because of graduate outcomes and what they are doing. What we might not do, although we would probably measure it by repeat business, so to speak, is track how the employer thinks that it has helped the student.

--- Later in debate ---

[Robert Halfon]

Q I want to ask you both about credit transfer. It will obviously be for the institution to decide on this—where people move their courses if they decide to transfer. There are good examples of this taking place already, as you well know. How will this work in practice? Will it be embraced by colleges and HE institutions?

Rachel Sandby-Thomas: As you rightly say, we do credit transfer sometimes, but it tends to be in the minority of students. The 2+2 course is a good example of that—generally students will do two years at a college and come to us for the final two years—but we know that college well, we know what they are teaching and we know the standards the students get to at the end of their two years at college, and that makes for an easy progression to us. That makes it much easier. There will be a lot more work if this really takes off, because we will have to get to know, assess and understand that prior learning in order to be able to recognise it. It would be a short-sighted kindness to allow a student who is not properly prepared to come on to a module if they have not reached the standard needed for that module. It might seem a kindness, but it does them no favours at all.

Sir David Bell: Making credit transfer work is a very important requirement if the lifelong loan entitlement is to work, because people will want to move between institutions. If we hold the mirror up to ourselves, I think universities also have to be a bit more liberal in this regard; we can at times be a bit sniffy when it comes to the qualifications that have been accrued in another institution. As Rachel said, there are a lot of good examples of this happening where you know your partner institutions. As a sector, we have to show that we are engaged in this by having better credit transfer arrangements without putting enormous bureaucratic hurdles in the way of students, who think, “Why can’t I transfer from this place to that place?”

[Matt Western]

Q We heard from a previous panellist about the importance of confidence in any new scheme. I think about T-levels, which have not really taken hold in the way the Government had perhaps hoped. If we are looking at 2025-26 as the year that this system may start, how can the Government make sure that there is the massive take-up to ensure it is a success?

Rachel Sandby-Thomas: The T-levels example is an interesting one. The take-up has been disappointing, but most people I talk to do not really know what T-levels are. It is all about communication and understanding. There needs to be a massive, well-planned communications campaign. It will be trickier with this policy, because it is more complex than T-levels. There have to be lots of lessons learnt from T-levels and the fact that take-up has been disappointing, and those lessons can be applied to this. It will be about communication, communication, communication—and, just when you think you have drenched people, communicate a bit more. We know what needs to be done, but sometimes it is a bit hard to do it.

Sir David Bell: We have had experience before with things such as accelerated degrees, where everyone thought, “Oh, there will be massive demand,” but that really did not materialise, so perhaps the lessons to learn—

[The Chair]

Order. I am afraid that that brings us to the end of the time allocated to the Committee to ask questions, and indeed the end of this morning’s sitting. On behalf of the Committee, I thank our witnesses for their evidence.