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

Toby Perkins Excerpts

Committee stage
Tuesday 21st March 2023 Public Bill Committees

[Sir David Evennett]

That is very encouraging; thank you.

[Mr Toby Perkins (Chesterfield) (Lab)]

Q On the number of new students who are likely to take up learning opportunities and would not have done so without this provision, how much of a game changer do you believe this legislation will be? Is it likely to bring lots of new students into learning, or will it just be an alternative option for those who would have studied? Secondly, is there anything you would like to see in the legislation that might enable it to be used by more learners?

Professor Press: Our university does not offer higher technical qualifications, and we do not validate providers that deliver HTQs. At the moment, the provision is targeted at a particular group of learners. Once it opens up in 2027-28, it will provide significant opportunities for both new and current learners who might want to space out their learning in a different way. My understanding—again, forgive me if I have misunderstood—is that this will develop slowly while we work out how we can operationalise it, and then there is a point at which it can open out and support many additional new learners.

[Mr Perkins]

Q What role do you believe there is for local employers in deciding which courses are on offer through the LLE?

Professor Press: While local employers will not provide the courses, there is not much point in us putting on modular learning if there is not a demand for the students who have gained that learning. We are a large and accessible provider of degree apprenticeships, and we work with over 500 employers in thinking about what sort of apprenticeships to run. I will be thinking about extending engagement with our apprentice employers, so that we can have the same sorts of conversations about putting on modular learning. It is through the providers that the employers will have the opportunity.

[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.

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[Robert Halfon]

Q What work needs to be done, apart from careers guidance, to get students more familiar with the new system and the fact that they can do modules or short courses as well as long courses?

Julie Charge: It is the connectivity. Students will be familiar with modules as part of something that, when they are applying, they see described to them in a range of different ways. There is therefore some work that we as a university would need to do to make it easy for them to understand the relationship between the module of the course that they want to participate in and the credits.

I think there is another aspect here, which is that, again, as a university, we link hours to credits. If we can link all those things in a way that gives much more clarity for a student, by saying, “This is the undertaking in hours, which equates to number of credits, which is therefore part of a module, and the module then builds up your course,” that clarity will help with that sort of common understanding.

[Mr Perkins]

Q Do you anticipate that this will mainly be utilised by learners who are in work currently and are looking to develop their careers, whose employers are looking to develop their skills, or by learners who are either out of work or looking to change jobs or employers?

Julie Charge: Probably a combination of both. We did the pilot on short courses. It was a very small sample size in terms of the take-up, but 40% of the applicants and those who went on to do the short course were in the 26 to 30 age group—and it was a combination of retraining after some initial work or an initial degree, and some initial training. Then we saw a different group: the other big group, who were retraining and upskilling, was aged 36 to 40. Of that group, some were continuing their studies, but the majority were external and returning to do that training. I cannot comment on whether there was unemployment, but there were certainly two big groups, in terms of age profile, that were returning to do the pilot course with us.

[Mr Perkins]

Q At that stage of their careers, the prospect of taking on debt did not dissuade them?

Julie Charge: No—of the people who took part and were recruited to that course, 50% took up the lifelong learning loan entitlement.

[Mr Perkins]

Q Do you have any concerns about the delivery of this approach or how it would operate for learners who are transferring from one institution to another? Do you think that there is enough clarity on those aspects?

Julie Charge: I think there is some way to go to understand how that transfer will work in practice. Having a commonality of modules and credits per module helps with that level of understanding, but in terms of the qualifications that go alongside that and the end result, that is unclear at this stage. Further work would be needed to work out things like who the awarding power would be for a course set up in such a way.

There are also some other points regarding the outcome of the course. I will just reflect on what we have at the moment with a three-year course. As you work through your levels—through levels 4, 5 and 6—the complexity obviously builds, in terms of your learning and understanding. Therefore, when we work through this, we would need to be assured of the level of work and the level of learning that is occurring through those years, in order to be assured that at the end the student can be awarded at the right level, and we can maintain that quality.

[Mr Perkins]

Q Finally, there is currently no involvement of the apprenticeship levy in the design of this system. What role would you expect existing initiatives, like the apprenticeship levy, bootcamps and others, to have in interacting with this kind of approach?

Julie Charge: This could absolutely play into an apprenticeship arrangement. Again, if we as an institution can think a bit more creatively about how we could do that, it would align quite nicely with the degree apprenticeships that already exist. It would need a bit of work, but that could sit alongside. Again, it is really important to reflect on trying to make it as easy as possible for students to understand their options and the outcomes—what this leads to for them; it will be important to join some of the dots, with a wide range of skills routes they can take. This is about making it easy, having clarity, and students understanding their outcomes.

[Gill Furniss (Sheffield, Brightside and Hillsborough) (Lab)]

Q I want to dig a bit deeper into the workforce issues. Having worked in further education for many years, I am very aware of the problem that the FE sector is having with recruitment and retention now. Much of that is because of the pay differential between, for instance, school teachers and FE lecturers—as well as, obviously, higher education lecturers. A previous witness said that an injection of cash would be very welcome. Can this be successful if there is not an injection of cash?

Julie Charge: If I go back to the experience that we had of trialling the short courses, it is possible to set this up. The administration is slightly more complex. It does not sit comfortably within an individual module or modules, because that is not how universities work. We have a three-year degree; a number of costs are included to support students during that period, and some modules are more expensive than others. There is some work here.

One of the learnings was not so much about the marketing, but about the understanding of what was available and ensuring there was enough knowledge in the marketplace for people to understand what they were coming into. In terms of cost, it is possible to do that, but there is something about the messaging of what is on offer, and making that clear for prospective students.

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[Mr Perkins]

Q I have a question for each of the witnesses. First, Sir David, prior to your current role, you were for a period the permanent secretary at the Department for Education. This legislation was originally intended to be in the Skills and Post-16 Education Bill but was then withdrawn, and we now have it as a separate Bill. We appreciate that the Government are rolling this out slowly. Notwithstanding that, what is your sense—we do not have the DFE responding to the Committee today—about how feasible and likely it is that the system will be in place by 2025-26, and about any barriers there might be to that operating properly?

Sir David Bell: I should probably remind the Committee that my experience of the Department is now long out of date, so I am not really in a position to comment on the current DFE. What I would say, however, is that the Department and the civil service more generally have always been used to managing these complex kinds of changes, so I have confidence there. I also know—this is an important part of the whole process—that the Student Loans Company is busily engaged in making all the preparations necessary to make the Bill a success. Looking in from the outside, I am confident that this will happen. Going back to the previous point, I think the time this will take is a good thing. Sometimes I am impatient about a slower pace of change, but in this case it is a very sensible and pragmatic approach.

[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.