Postgraduate Education

Rehman Chishti Excerpts

Wednesday 25th January 2012 Westminster Hall

[Mr Sheerman]

I think the Minister has gone as far as we can persuade him to go. Perhaps there is time for reflection, because there was almost nothing about postgraduate research in the White Paper, and perhaps this is an opportunity to cover that. If the higher education sector is not considered holistically, something is very wrong indeed. It should be considered from when students are recruited right through to PhD, doctorate and post-doctorate level.

I am sure, Mr Hollobone, that you took part in the Royal Society’s twinning scheme between research scientists and Members of Parliament. It was one of my most enlightening activities as a Member. One realises what a precious resource it is when young people have come through university, obtained a brilliant first degree, are encouraged to go on to a master’s degree, followed by a full research doctorate, and then post-doctoral work. In my placements when I have been part of the scheme under the last Government and now, it is a worry that if there is no continuous educational progression, the research stream starts to dry up. Post-docs get to a stage when they are getting on bit, they are married, they have a couple of kids and they are finding it hard to maintain a decent standard of living, and if there are no full-time scientific research positions or academic posts that are well paid, or relatively well paid—we are not talking bankers here—the whole system starts to look very thin indeed.

[Rehman Chishti (Gillingham and Rainham) (Con)]

I congratulate the hon. Gentleman on securing this important debate, and on his excellent work on the matter over many years. On research, does he agree that we must pay tribute to the excellent work of the seven UK research councils which, with the research charities, do a fantastic job in providing support and funding for postgraduate research in innovative areas?

[Mr Sheerman]

I am happy to do that. The research councils are a brave body of men and women, and they are going through tough times, because they are eking out research grants to many people who need and deserve them. It is a tough time to be entering the postgraduate world. They are in the firing line for saying yes or no, and too often it is no.

[Mr Sheerman]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right, and that is why I keep pleading for higher education to be considered holistically through the career path of senior researchers and academics to retirement, and to consider the demographics of that. My hon. Friend makes the strong point that we must keep refreshing and replenishing that stock all the time. Many of our senior academics are approaching retirement age in a bunch as the demographics work.

When it is announced that one has a debate such as this, information pours in from all over the place. I pay tribute to Universities UK, the Russell group, the ’92 group and others who have furnished me with excellent background material. I was reading about some of the important things that we do in the research community: employer engagement, research, executive education, knowledge transfer, regional partnership building, and so on. But I return to teasing the Minister about the policy vacuum.

Let us look at the history. In March 2010, the Adrian Smith review, “One Step Beyond: Making the most of postgraduate education”, was published. What has happened to it? Sir Adrian has been pulled in—I am sure he did not have be pulled in, but was delighted—to talk to the Minister, who has got his team together again for at least one meeting. Will he enlighten us on whether that review is going anywhere in influencing Government policy? That would be useful.

I want to dwell on the rather dark side of the argument. Higher education and the postgraduate world are heavily dependent on a particular market, and when I was Chair of the Education Committee, I looked at the international market in higher education. The Committee learned that it is intensely competitive. Universities all over the world compete, and five years ago the main competitors were the United States, Australia and emerging countries such as India and China, sometimes in partnership with UK and US universities. It is a very competitive world, and includes Saudi Arabia, India and Germany. The Germans and the Dutch are now teaching postgraduate and undergraduate courses in English to attract a broader audience. If the income from international students were taken out of higher education, we would be in a sad state indeed.

That market is heavily dependent on taught postgraduate work—the one-year or two-year master’s degree. It is highly competitive. As a member of the court of governors of the London School of Economics, I know it very well. It is highly competitive, and there is no cap on fees, which are very competitive. At the lower end, there are some good cheap bargains in higher education in the UK. At the higher end, a business master’s degree in some of our better-known departments of management will cost a lot of money.

Growth in the number of international students, great threat from competition, and—I do not want to be partisan—a slightly clumsily organised change in the visa arrangements have had an impact on some good institutions. I am the first to say that there were some dodgy players pretending to be respectable colleges, and we could have used a little more finesse in weeding out the obvious cowboy operators without impacting on the serious players in higher education, but there is no doubt that visas have been a difficulty, as have the cuts in teaching grants. We have no tuition fee loans for postgraduates, and the research councils cannot help with that.

[Rehman Chishti]

Does the hon. Gentleman agree that the Government made it clear that they are committed to supporting funding? They said that they are

“maintaining the annual £4.6 billion budget for science and research programmes with £150 million each year supporting university-business interaction.”—[Official Report, 8 December 2011; Vol. 537, c. 35WS.]

In these difficult economic times, the Government have made it clear that they are committed to supporting that funding.

[Mr Sheerman]

I do not want to be very party political today, but I will be party political in the sense that I still do not think that that is good enough. There is a problem with overall cuts in funding. The view that we are all in it together and so everyone has to stay at the same point is one with which I have never agreed. Why do we have to kill the goose that lays the golden eggs? We need only look at the international competition and how much money is being put into research and development, higher education and postgraduate education worldwide. This is a time when we should be being as ambitious as anything because the payoff, the return to the community, in relatively fast terms is very large. There is a great bonus to be had from moving in that direction. I understand what the hon. Gentleman says, but I think that for higher education, every bit of investment is very worth while.

I do not know the hon. Gentleman’s constituency and community, but in mine, investment in the university is the one way in which we will get regeneration. I cannot remember his constituency, but I have been telling the Government for a long time, because people ask, “Are we in recession or aren’t we?”, that outside London and the south-east, we have been in recession for a long time, and if it was not for the universities, heaven knows where we would be, so any bit of investment in research in universities and any bit of investment that encourages participatory working with small and medium-sized enterprises in our regions is worth while. I would have thought that any Government in their right mind would be pouring money into that.

[Mr Sheerman]

As ever, my hon. Friend is absolutely right about that. I want to gallop through the last part of my speech.

[Rehman Chishti]

I am most grateful to the hon. Gentleman for giving way again; he is very generous and always has been. He raises the issue of universities in different parts of the country. There are four universities in Medway, with 10,000 students, and they do a fantastic job. The point that I want to make to the hon. Gentleman was made to me by Professor John Williams from the university of Wales at Aberystwyth. He said that much of postgraduate funding comes from outside the block grant, and to increase funding, people have to go out there and get more funding from industry and benefactors coming into postgraduate education. What more does the hon. Gentleman think needs to be done to get that funding?

[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.