Higher Education and Research Bill (Fourth sitting)

Roger Mullin Excerpts

Committee Debate: 4th sitting: House of Commons
Thursday 8th September 2016 Public Bill Committees

[Roger Mullin (Kirkcaldy and Cowdenbeath) (SNP)]

It is a pleasure to serve under you again, Mr Hanson. I hope that this is not a private fight, and that the Committee does not mind a Scot intruding in this debate, which would seem rather strange to anyone who has been in receipt of university education in Scotland, because universities in Scotland have had students at their centre, in different ways, for centuries. Indeed, the amendments are extraordinarily modest in their intent.

Some may know that for centuries ancient universities in Scotland—the four ancients, as we call them—have had elected rectors. Only the students have been able to vote to elect rectors, who are chairs of the court. That has not led to an utter collapse in the system. Indeed, the other day we heard a professor saying how proud he was that his university was ranked 19th in the world. Over the years there have been some aberrations; in the early 1970s in Edinburgh, they elected a student as rector, who did go on to No. 10: a Mr Gordon Brown, I believe, who also used to be able to get elected as MP for Kirkcaldy and Cowdenbeath, but no more.

Having worked in the education sector at times, I know that students can show remarkably wise judgment: students elected me honorary president of Paisley University in the early 1970s for two years. More recently, when I was doing some work at Stirling University, I was invited to chair the students’ association as an external person. The engagement has been great, and there are many platforms for student engagement.

The serious point I would like to make about the nature of student engagement, however, is that we should look at some of the problems that we have on boards, not just in the education sector, but more generally in society. Look at what happened when the banks crashed. The Government regularly point out that part of the problem is group-think on boards—in other words, nobody on the board comes from a different perspective, able to challenge.

Although I respect many of the contributions we heard in evidence in the past two days, it strikes me that many of the people were talking with similar assumptions and in similar ways. We are just as likely to get group-think among well suited academics sitting together in a room as we are on the board of a bank. Student representation can provide a type of challenge, which is important. It is not even a problem if challenges are wrong, as long as there is challenge. To avoid group-think, there should always be someone willing to provide that challenge. That is where I think student representation has a particular role to play. If I correctly understood the hon. Member for Blackpool South to say that he intends to put his amendment to a vote, we will be happy to support it.

[Joseph Johnson]

I will respond to amendments 2, 122 and 3 together, as they all relate to student representation on the board. As I said earlier, students’ interests really are at the heart of the reforms. They are hard-baked into the Bill. They are clearly and explicitly, in black and white, in schedule 1, in which, as has already been made clear, the Secretary of State must have regard to the desirability of the OFS board containing people with experience of representing students’ interests.

We will continue to engage with our partners as the implementation plans are developed. That will include ensuring that the student perspective is represented on boards and decision-making bodies. That is why, for the first time, we are setting up an office for students, with the intention, set out in primary legislation, that its members will, between them, have experience of representing such interests. I think it is fair for the Committee to acknowledge that that is progress. The current legislative framework, which was set up in 1992, did not have any requirements for the board of HEFCE or its predecessors to have experience of representing the student interest. It is also fair to acknowledge that putting students at the heart of the governance of the main regulatory body that will oversee the sector is a significant step in the right direction, even if that is not quite as hard-baked as the hon. Member for Blackpool South would like, in terms of prescribing the specific number of people on boards who are capable of representing the student interest, or prescribing that those involved be current students.