Education, Skills and Training

Rupa Huq Excerpts

Wednesday 25th May 2016 Commons Chamber

[Joseph Johnson]

I hope that my hon. Friend will be proved wrong, but I suspect that he may be proved right during proceedings on the Bill, as we discover the Labour party’s true colours and the reality of its desire to see competition injected into the sector, which I somewhat doubt.

The former Business Secretary is right. The Higher Education and Research Bill, which we introduced last week, represents an ambitious agenda for social mobility. Some, including Labour Members, said when we reformed student finance in 2011 that participation would fall. In fact, the opposite has happened. We have a progressive student loans system that ensures that finance is no barrier to entry, and it is working. Students from disadvantaged backgrounds are going to university at a record rate—up from 13.6% in 2009 to 18.5% in 2015. Labour Members were wrong then and they are wrong now. Individuals from disadvantaged backgrounds are 36% more likely to go to university than they were in 2009. If the hon. Member for Wallasey wants to come in on that point, I will happily take an intervention. No? Okay. We are not complacent. The Prime Minister has set us the rightly challenging goal of doubling the participation rate for the most disadvantaged students by 2020.

[Dr Rupa Huq (Ealing Central and Acton) (Lab)]

Has the Minister seen the figures from the Sutton Trust that show that only 3% of disadvantaged young people go to the most selective third of universities, compared with 21% from the richest neighbourhoods? Is he proud of that record?

[Joseph Johnson]

Yes, indeed. That is why I have just written to the director of fair access, Les Ebdon, giving him all the political cover that he needs to drive further progress in widening participation at the most selective institutions.

We are strengthening the system of access agreements. They will now cover both access and participation, so that students receive the support that they need right the way through their courses, not just at the point of entry. We will give the new director of fair access and participation, who will be part of the new office for students, a greater set of sanctions to help to ensure that universities deliver the agreements they have made with him.

Some students face additional barriers to accessing higher education because their religious beliefs mean they are unable to take on interest-bearing loans. That is why, subject to Parliament, we will be the first Government to introduce an alternative student finance product that will support those students into higher education. That, combined with other measures, will help us to meet our goal of increasing the number of people from black and minority ethnic backgrounds—one third of whom are Muslim—who go to university. We are committed to an increase of 20% in the number of BME students by 2020.

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[Dr Rupa Huq (Ealing Central and Acton) (Lab)]

I want to focus my contribution on higher education and lifelong learning, which has the tortured acronym of HELL. There is plenty to go on not only in the Gracious Speech but in last week’s White Paper, which is titled “Success as a Knowledge Economy: Teaching Excellence, Social Mobility and Student Choice”. I contend that it is the bit after the colon that is simply not matched by this Government’s actions.

Teaching excellence is ostensibly dealt with in the teaching excellence framework, which has already caused widespread concern, uniting Universities UK, the National Union of Students and my alma mater, the University of Cambridge. There are serious worries that linking teaching excellence to fee levels with a performance element will undermine teaching. It will force universities into further competition and represents a homogenisation of teaching standards. This Government said that they were into devolution, after all. Linking fees to inflation could see fees being hiked up to 10 k—who knows?—and there is a worry that the TEF could be a Trojan horse for a further lifting of the fee cap to who knows where. The University of Cambridge has argued that linking the TEF and the fee cap will deter students from lower-income backgrounds. In short, therefore, only the wealthiest will be able to afford the top universities. The NUS is also opposed to the change.

Other eye-catching features include the plan to introduce new universities and so-called challenger institutions, seemingly though a relaxation of the criteria to usher in what is, at best, deregulation and, at worst, privatisation through the back door. The threshold of 1,000 students to qualify as a university is to be lifted. New providers can get degree-awarding powers in three years and full university status after another three years. Due to the probationary period during which institutions can grant degrees, there is the prospect of students getting a degree from an institution that then fails its probation. What would happen to those students?

There are question marks all over the place here. The removal of safeguards means that these untried, untested challenger institutions could expand very rapidly and then contract rapidly if they all start failing their three-year probation. As well as the standards issue, there seems to be a huge oversight on the whole issue of further education, which my hon. Friend the Member for Ashton-under-Lyne (Angela Rayner) so powerfully described. Ealing, Hammersmith and West London College in my constituency has recently given its 500th MBA. These institutions already have degree-awarding powers, so what will be the place for them? It is all very unclear.

Caution is being sounded across the sector. The Russell Group, which comprises our oldest institutions—the Oxbridges are all in there—has worries about this move undermining the international reputation of UK universities. Million+, at the other end, which represents the post-1992 sector and, thus, 50% of all full-time students in the UK, including those at the University of West London in my constituency, talks about the risk this approach poses to students. Universities UK says that these new institutions potentially devalue the label. It is important to remember that universities do not just operate to award degrees, but have a much wider civic role in the community, spreading public good and so on.

The White Paper also has a strapline on “improving social mobility”. Everyone has referred to the much talked of letter from the young, promising Member for Tatton in 2003, who promised that he would abolish fees if the Conservatives were elected. It has rightly become an internet sensation, because of some of the things he was incredulous about at the time. He talked about fees, which at the time were £1,000 only—they rose subsequently and there was then a trebling to £9,000 under this Government’s watch. He also talked about how people were leaving with an average debt of £18,000 at the time, but it seems that the sky is the limit on both of those things under the proposals in this White Paper and this Queen’s Speech.

There are worries about these so-called reforms, in relation to the funding cuts, the tuition fee increase and the potential to destabilise the whole sector, which has knock-on effects for students. The Sutton Trust, which I mentioned earlier, has warned that, even if participation levels are going up, there is a yawning gap between those from the richest and the poorest wards, particularly in Russell Group institutions. Again, there are lots of question marks in respect of the Office for Fair Access, overarching powers and how they have the potential to erode institutional autonomy. The idea of covering action and participation in the mission statement for this new office for students is laudable, but let us not forget that if we are talking about lifelong learning, this Government have slashed education maintenance allowance, ESOL—English for speakers of other languages—adult skills and social mobility funding, and have abolished maintenance grants and the child trust fund, which was mentioned earlier. I am therefore not filled with confidence as to what this White Paper and Queen’s Speech will lead to next.

I could go on and on, as I was employed in the university sector before I got to this place. In one way or another I was in universities for 25 years before May 2015. People from my old union, the University and College Union, are on picket lines today because of the plummeting staff morale, the rocketing number of staff on zero-hours contracts, the creeping casualisation and a real-terms decline in pay. All these things have knock-on effects on students, and we all want the best student experience for all. I could talk about the Higher Education and Research Bill, a dog’s breakfast on which there has not been proper consultation with the unions or providers. As everyone is preoccupied with the EU referendum, let me also say that if we were to live in a post-Brexit world, the science budget for this country—even student mobility programmes such as Erasmus—would be seriously imperilled. I know that that is not strictly what we are talking about today, but I caution against voting leave for that reason.

Teaching excellence is not assured in these plans, social mobility is poised to go backwards and student choice is completely illusory in what we are being offered. Lifelong learning should also look at other pathways. The number of part-time students is down 38% and the number of mature students has decreased by 180,000 since 2010. Lifelong learning should not just be about offering a cut-price “Brideshead Revisited”, via pile ’em high, flog ’em off so-called challenger institutions. As I have run out time, I will end there.