Postgraduate Education

Philip Hollobone Excerpts

Wednesday 25th January 2012 Westminster Hall

[Mr Philip Hollobone (in the Chair)]

I welcome hon. Members and warn them that we may be interrupted by Divisions in the House. If that happens there will be a 15-minute interruption to proceedings. Let us hope that that does not happen.

[Mr Barry Sheerman (Huddersfield) (Lab/Co-op)]

It is a pleasure to speak in Westminster Hall again, Mr Hollobone, but under your chairmanship for the first time. I hope that I will not need much calling to order during my remarks.

The Minister knows about my long-term interest in higher education and so do my colleagues. I thank my hon. Friend the Member for City of Durham (Roberta Blackman-Woods), truly a good friend and not just formally so, who had the original idea when she asked, “Isn’t it time that we talked about postgraduate education?” thereby inspiring me to request this debate, which I am delighted about and lucky enough to introduce.

I introduce this debate with a fair-minded point of view. Many hon. Members know that I have a long-term interest in education. I chaired the Education Committee under its different names for 10 years and particularly enjoyed my time as the Chair of the Education and Skills Committee, when I had a brief covering higher education, stolen away as it was when I became the Chair of the Children, Schools and Families Committee, which did not have the higher education remit. I have missed it.

Many years ago, I started the all-party parliamentary university group, on which my hon. Friend the Member for City of Durham now has a senior position, because it was important that this vital sector in our economy had a good relationship, good conversation and good communication with Members of both Houses of Parliament.

I have a long-term interest. I am now involved in the newly formed Higher Education Commission, chaired by Lord Broers, the first inquiry of which will look at postgraduate education. It is important to discuss that part of higher education because it is a bit isolated—on its own—and we have had a pretty eventful period for undergraduate education over the past months and years. Everyone has been busy looking at student finance for undergraduates, which has led, unfortunately, to our taking our eye off the postgraduate world.

I read somewhere recently that the Minister said—I believe him—that the noble Lord Mandelson could not be persuaded to include the postgraduate sector in the Browne review of higher education. I shall give way to the Minister if he wants to correct me.

--- Later in debate ---

[Mr Sheerman]

I will not be tempted by that question because I intend to talk about that issue at the end of my speech and I would ruin it if I did so now. It might surprise people in Westminster Hall this afternoon, but there is some shape to my speech—a little. Let me gallop through the rest of it. I will come to the hon. Gentleman’s point, I promise.

At present, there is one great danger—well, there is more than one, but let us start with this one that I have picked up over the years. I want as many UK-based students as possible to come through as postgraduates, as the researchers of the future, but too often, I am looking at departments—even the big science departments of the big science universities—that rely too much on overseas students. In science and engineering, students come particularly from China and India. In other subjects, the students are very often from the United States. People can see the statistics on that. UK students are increasingly coming through with high levels of debt—EU students are also pretty stretched in the present economic climate—and I worry that those high levels of debt may be putting them off further study. There is the belief that debt levels will be much higher in the future. Whether they are right or wrong, they are thinking, “Can I afford to go on into postgraduate education and then the commitment of a doctorate and all the rest?”

I become very worried when I look at the statistics and I hope that the Minister will come back to us on the matter. Is he content with the number of UK-based students, particularly in the challenging subjects to which I am referring? We have to have a high density of scientists and clusters of scientists in our country. In particular, is he confident that we will be breeding the postgraduates that we need—tomorrow’s researchers?

We want to keep up the research dynamic in our country. We want to keep up its international excellence. We still have it. We find it very easy to do ourselves down in this country. We say, “Oh, it’s all terrible.” It is not all terrible. We still have fantastic universities that have the top ratings in the world. However, it is possible to become a little complacent and then suddenly our institutions become less attractive, not just to overseas students but to the high-level, high-calibre scientists who we want to come and work in them as part of the teams there. We must keep up the research dynamic if we are to have international excellence.

I am also worried about access to postgraduate education. As Alan Milburn said in his report on social mobility, are we getting into a situation in which only kids from very wealthy backgrounds can contemplate staying on in education long enough to push their talent to its furthest potential? That really worries me. Will we be in a situation in which many bright young people from less well-off backgrounds are put off staying with a science or a social science? Will they be put off staying in education long enough to be part of a successful research future?

Let me return to the point made by the hon. Member for Gillingham and Rainham (Rehman Chishti). I am totally in favour of partnership between researchers and industry. I think that it is fantastic. People can see that I am in my best suit today. This is real Huddersfield cloth. Not many people could afford it, but I am the Member for Huddersfield and am in a privileged position. I should not drop names, but the reason why I am wearing it is not that I am in your company, Mr Hollobone, but that I am having dinner this evening with Lord Bhattacharyya. He is one of the great exponents of partnership across universities. He built Warwick as a partnership university and has had great success.

I believe in partnership, but I also believe in free science. I believe in academics having the freedom to conduct science that has nothing to do with likely commercialisation. That is what I call free science—science for its own sake, or the subject for its own sake. It could be social science; I am a social scientist by training. It should be able to go somewhere where it does not have to be sponsored and does not have to have a tag saying that it might be useful to some institution, lobby group or whatever. The fact is that we will be a poorer nation and will cease to be a high-science nation if we do not have what I call free science. Free science research must be at the heart of what we do. That is not to gainsay at all the wonderful relationships that do other kinds of more applied science.

This is an important debate. I am sure that the other hon. Members present will say much more profound things than I have said, but there is a policy vacuum that needs to be filled. We need a sense of direction for the future of postgraduate education and research in this country. We also need to know that our research universities have a healthy future and that anyone in our country who has talent and the potential to contribute to that will be able to do so.

[Mr Philip Hollobone (in the Chair)]

The hon. Gentleman may be wearing a suit made of cloth from his constituency. I am wearing shoes made by Cheaney’s in Desborough in my constituency. I am sure that we both appreciate each other’s attire.

Mr Speaker has received a very nice handwritten note from Paul Blomfield, so I call him to speak next.

[Paul Blomfield (Sheffield Central) (Lab)]

Thank you, Mr Hollobone. I appreciate Mr Speaker’s recognition of my efforts to be called today. It is a delight to contribute to the debate under your chairmanship.

I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Huddersfield (Mr Sheerman) on securing this debate. There is concern across the sector, which, I think, has been shared by the Minister, over the lack of attention that has been given to postgraduate education in the whole debate about the future of our universities and our higher education system and in the higher education reforms. I am not sure where those reforms stand now in the light of the announcement in The Daily Telegraph yesterday of the Government’s new position, to which the Minister has not added much clarity, but I am sure that he will come back to it later in the debate.

Postgraduate education issues and the failure of the Browne review to look at them were matters that I raised with Lord Browne when he appeared before the Business, Innovations and Skills Committee. It was clear that he did not have the inclination to examine postgraduate study, despite recognising in his earlier evidence that what happened in one area of the sector was important to the other areas. In one of those bizarre moments in our fairly long discussion with Lord Browne, he said that we had to understand the interdependence in the sector. What we do in one part of the sector has an impact on another part, he said. He told the Select Committee that he did not look at postgraduate education in anything other than in the most cursory way. Instead, he pointed to the postgraduate review chaired by Sir Adrian Smith and said that it would tackle the issues, and indeed it did in many ways.

When the Smith panel published its report in March 2010, it identified four significant challenges: promoting the value of postgraduate study to both potential students and employers; ensuring that sufficient emphasis is placed on skills, development and employability; crucially, considering barriers to the access and availability of financial support; and, finally, providing key information better to inform student choice, which has been at the heart of the Government’s narrative.

Not unreasonably, there was an expectation that those issues would be addressed in the White Paper on higher education. Surprisingly, though, they were not addressed, and the White Paper declares an intention to revisit postgraduate funding as the new system of undergraduate funding beds in. Universities UK said that that approach

“does not address some of the challenges the sector faces in maintaining postgraduate provision in the meantime, not least because of the withdrawal of elements of HEFCE teaching funding from as early as 2012/13.”

My hon. Friend has convincingly made the case for postgraduate education. It is an important part of the higher education sector. We have some of the top universities in the world, and our postgraduate education has an international reputation. It makes a vital contribution to the economy and is a major foreign export earner.

Over the past decade, the number of taught postgraduate students has grown significantly—around 40% since 1999. Taught postgraduate students now make up around 20% of the total student population, rising from 17% a decade ago. Much of that growth is attributable to international student recruitment—it certainly was before the visa changes—and to a growing number of young, under 25-year-old, UK students. There was nearly a 16% increase in the number of under-25-year-olds going on to postgraduate taught study between 2008-09 and 2009-10. One of the key reasons for that, which was confirmed by the postgraduate taught experience survey in 2010, was that they wanted to distinguish themselves in an increasingly competitive employment market and to improve their employment prospects.

In advance of today’s debate, I talked to academic and student leaders at the two fine universities in my constituency—the university of Sheffield and Sheffield Hallam university. I spoke to the vice-chancellor of Sheffield, Professor Keith Burnett, who the Minister knows and, like me, respects as one of our outstanding academic leaders. I asked him, “What would be the key points that you would want us to focus on in our discussions this afternoon?” He said that his concerns were twofold, and that they were both about access. First, professions that require postgraduate work, such as law and architecture, will have an increasingly more biased social mix, as the effect of undergraduate loans bears down on applicants from a widening participation background. Secondly, many areas in arts and humanities rely on self-funded students for department income and for training future university teachers. He said that that will lead to universities being staffed by those from more privileged backgrounds.

Professor Keith Burnett’s concerns were echoed by Thom Arnold, student president at Sheffield university. He said that his main concern relating to postgraduate education

“is funding and widening participation, in particular related to the impact of rising prices for postgraduate courses without a funding system in place”—

I hope the Minister will talk about that issue—

“and what impact this will have, particularly on people from lower socio-economic backgrounds. We are concerned that people will be priced out of postgraduate study, and as a result will also be unable to access professions where a masters is a prerequisite. We see a clear need for a review of funding and support arrangements for postgraduates with a view that this review will lead to the development of income contingent loans for postgraduates.”

Reflecting on a point in the Smith review, which I hope the Minister will also address, he said:

“Another area is access to information and guidance. The White Paper aims to put students at the heart of the system by providing more information to undergraduates with the key information sets. However, potential postgraduate students still remain largely in the dark when applying. Despite the limitations of key information sets, an attempt to roll out a KIS style for postgraduate taught students would be positive.”

Jake Kitchener is student president at Sheffield Hallam university and represents students drawn from a different demographic. He had the same concerns but raised an additional point. He said:

“We think it’s disgraceful that there is still no financial provision for those wishing to take up postgraduate study. I have spoken with students who have saved in excess of £10,000 just so that they can afford to go to university. The alternative is a graduate development loan, but it isn’t available to prospective students with a low credit rating, and when the student finishes it is a huge burden.”

Importantly, he said that mature students, who are a significant component of Hallam’s demographic mix, are not taken into account. He said:

“Those returning to study may have families, mortgages to pay and a reduction in income as they dedicate time to their studies. However, currently there are no systems in place to aid postgraduate study. Returning to education is a positive, but currently there is no student funding support to anyone that wants it. It’s a regressive system and our postgraduate students feel disregarded and hard done by.”

Those views are confirmed by a survey undertaken by the National Union of Students, which said that 60% of those whom it surveyed—a large sample—claimed that accessibility of finance or funding was a major factor on deciding whether to undertake postgraduate study. Some 67% of those whom it spoke to were entirely self-funded through a combination of savings, earnings, family loans and, in 15% of cases, overdrafts or credit cards. It also found out that self-funded students, who had often made the greatest effort to undertake that programme, were more likely than funded students to consider leaving or suspending their studies because of the financial pressures.

There is a crisis in postgraduate education funding. If it is not effectively addressed, we can expect to see mounting costs leading to decreased demand, closure of courses and increased reliance on international postgraduate income, which, however welcome in itself, should not be a substitute for the opportunities for UK students. Crucially, the UK population’s skill levels could decline, when we need higher-level skills to support growth and the knowledge economy, as the Minister will agree.

As my hon. Friend the Member for Huddersfield said, the crisis that we face in postgraduate education funding is due to two key factors: the impact of undergraduate higher education funding reforms, with which the Minister will not necessarily agree, but on which I would welcome his comments; and the impact of international student visa changes, with which I guess that he would agree, although he probably will not admit it. It is certainly true, as my hon. Friend said, that those changes were pushed through clumsily, and they could have been finessed better. We should have sought to deal with the issue not on the demand side, by discouraging applications, but on the supply side, by cracking down on the bogus colleges that have been mentioned.

The debate is not, however, just about postgraduate taught-course funding. Postgraduate taught courses, in particular, are a critical route to undertaking research programmes. As the million+ group of modern universities points out, students undertaking postgraduate qualifications not only provide future staff potential, but add significant value to our universities and the academic communities of which they are a part. As I said in an intervention, we need to recognise the concern that Research Councils UK has expressed about the demographic time bomb in our ageing academic population. If our universities are to play the role that my hon. Friend rightly talked about, that issue must be addressed.

Like my hon. Friend, I feel passionately about the role our universities can play in our economic future. Sheffield is a city with a fine industrial and manufacturing history, but it is seeking to identify a new way forward in a changing economy. The critical way that it can do that is by combining the innovation and research expertise of our universities with the traditional manufacturing skills in our city. As the Minister will agree, there is no finer example of that than the Advanced Manufacturing Research Centre at Waverley. That initiative was the work of the university of Sheffield and its key partners, Boeing and Rolls-Royce, and it has led to extraordinary innovation in manufacturing, but it came about only because of the sort of research capacity that we need to cherish.

In conclusion, I hope the Minister will spell out how the Government plan to address the four issues identified by the Smith review: promoting the value of postgraduate study; emphasising skills development and employability; critically, overcoming the barriers to financial support; and providing key information to enable student choice.

[Mr Philip Hollobone (in the Chair)]

I understand that Roberta Blackman-Woods has a postgraduate degree, represents a university town and is married to a professor. Even though she is dangerously overqualified, I am going to call her next.

[Roberta Blackman-Woods (City of Durham) (Lab)]

Thank you, Mr Hollobone. It was very kind of you to make those comments. May I say what a pleasure it is to serve under your chairmanship?

I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Huddersfield (Mr Sheerman) on securing this timely debate and on his excellent speech. I also congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Sheffield Central (Paul Blomfield), who gave such an excellent speech that I am going to repeat some of it.

Postgraduate education is important in a number of different ways. It is important for the individuals who undertake study, because they can improve their employment opportunities, become the innovators of tomorrow and contribute to business development and to solving some of the economic and social challenges facing our country and others.

Postgraduate education is therefore important for individuals, but it is also important for universities, as my hon. Friend the Member for Huddersfield mentioned. Universities obviously benefit from the strengthening of the academic community that results from having postgraduate students. Indeed, I regularly see postgraduate students at Durham university bringing forward ideas, linking them into the work of academic programmes and teams and really taking those ideas in a new direction. That is very exciting for universities.

Increasingly, however, postgraduate education is also a marker of Britain’s academic standing in the world. I see a lot of postgraduate students in Durham from overseas, and they contribute to not only its international community, but its international research teams. Increasingly, that is how research develops in this country, although we mostly see it in science and engineering subjects. Those students are critical to not only securing economic growth, but helping to deal with some of our challenges.

The UK is second only to the United States in attracting international students, so it is important that we ask the Minister some serious questions about whether we will be able to maintain that international standing and whether new procedures or policies will need to be put in place to keep our standing as high as it is. Concern has been expressed in the academic community about whether we will be able to do that.

I thank the Minister again for attending the recent meeting of the all-party university group, when we looked at the White Paper. We really appreciated the time he spent talking to us about it. I hope that the session was not a complete and utter waste of time and that something from the White Paper will emerge in a Bill at some stage for us to consider. As the Minister will know from that session, a number of vice-chancellors have expressed concern about postgraduate study and wanted to hear more from the Government about how it would be strengthened. Indeed, million+ has said that there is a real risk that we will move into a period of decline, particularly in terms of UK-domiciled postgraduate students. Does the Minister share that concern?

There are two big issues with regard to postgraduate education. One is access, which several people have mentioned, and the other is financing. The Milburn report, which was called “Unleashing Aspiration”, addressed access and said that postgraduate qualifications

“have increasingly become an important route into many professional careers—in the law, creative industries, the Civil Service, management professions and others. But these courses are substantially more expensive than undergraduate degrees—often costing up to £12,000 per year—and there is no student support framework equivalent to the framework for undergraduate. New proposals need to be formulated to establish a clear, transparent and fair system of student financial support for postgraduate learners.”

That throws a real challenge out to the Government. If they are really serious about higher education contributing to social mobility, it should not stop at undergraduate level, and we need to look at postgraduate level.

While I am on my feet, I would not like to miss the opportunity to say that I am glad that the Milburn report did not think about widening access to higher education just in terms of getting some—a few—bright students from lower-income backgrounds into Oxford and Cambridge. It considered the wider issue of making higher education available across the piece to low-income students and, importantly, put the issue of postgraduate education on the agenda. I hope that the shadow Minister as well as the Minister will speak about that issue.

There is growing concern about access. I come from a low-income background and did several years of postgraduate study, but I am not sure whether that would be possible now for someone of my background. That is of concern to us. In researching the issue we could not find any study with up-to-date figures about the diversity or lack of it in postgraduate education, or about the current barriers, and we could not discover whether under-represented groups have been considered specifically. Perhaps the Minister would comment on that.

Before the Labour Government left office in March 2010 the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills put forward a series of recommendations on improving postgraduate education, in “One Step Beyond: Making the most of postgraduate education”. To be fair to the Minister, that report and its recommendations did not just fall off a precipice, which has happened in other contexts. They were brought back in the Government’s response to the postgraduate review, and the recommendations are almost identical. Obviously, those are excellent recommendations. One, for example, states:

“Universities UK and Research Councils UK should do more to identify and promote the economic and social value of postgraduate study.”

The response also states that attention needs to be given to funding. Some specific proposals are mentioned about getting research councils to work with other bodies

“to offer longer periods of postgraduate research”

so that perhaps students can earn income as well. I am sure that hon. Members will be pleased that I am not going to go through the list, as there is not time; but are those proposals being addressed? They seem to offer at least a partial way forward for improving access to higher education and the funding regime.

I also want to ask whether the Department has thought about what recent changes in undergraduate student finance and funding would mean for postgraduate education. The withdrawal of about 80% of teaching funding in England is affecting postgraduate courses, and possibly making them more expensive. In addition, students will finish undergraduate courses with a level of debt that may make them less likely to take up career development loans, in particular, or additional debt to undertake postgraduate study. The National Union of Students says that that is a real worry; in its view the average postgraduate taught fee will rise by about 24% by 2012-13. That could obviously add a disincentive.

My hon. Friend the Member for Sheffield Central also pointed out valuable work by the NUS in surveying current postgraduate students about their financial circumstances. It is worth repeating a few of the points that were made. The survey, carried out in October 2010, was a large one, and 60% said that accessibility of finance or funding was a major factor in deciding whether to undertake postgraduate study. That figure rose to 70% among respondents studying full-time. The 67% who were entirely self-funded were very concerned about debt, overdrafts and credit cards. Self-funded students were also more likely than funded students to consider leaving or suspending their studies, owing to financial concerns. I want to raise that with the Minister, because the more we rely on self-funding, the more students may drop out, as they are just unable to carry on with their studies and raise the necessary income. Fifty-two per cent. of those in receipt of financial support said that postgraduate study would not have been an option for them without it. From my experience I would also make that point.

There are two big challenges: access and funding. Addressing those issues is important, because, as hon. Members have said, not only is postgraduate education important for individuals and universities; it is essential for the country to invest in it, if we are to grow our way out of the economic crisis. If the Minister needs evidence for that he need only read the Centre for Cities report produced a few days ago. It made clear the link between growing a knowledge-based, higher-level-skilled economy and being able to ride out economic downturns. We need that to happen here: beyond the five cities that were identified in the report as potentially doing well, we need universities and research to be at the heart of economic regeneration. I look forward to hearing from the Minister how he will ensure that that happens.

[Mr Philip Hollobone (in the Chair)]

Even though Luton Town twice beat Kettering Town 5-0, both home and away, this season, I am still pleased to call the hon. Member for Luton South (Gavin Shuker).