Higher Education and Research Bill

Baroness Blackstone Excerpts

Monday 9th January 2017 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Wolf of Dulwich (CB)]

My Lords, I rise to speak to Amendments 55, 62, 72, 426 and 432, tabled in my name and those of the noble Baronesses, Lady Garden of Frognal and Lady Brown of Cambridge, and I will be very brief. I want to say how excellent is the amendment tabled by my noble friend Lord Kerslake because it encapsulates all our concerns about autonomy. I also agree with the eloquent speeches made by my noble friends Lord Kerslake and Lady Deech.

Importantly, these amendments deal with the whole of higher education, not just with universities. We will probably say this on a number of occasions in the weeks ahead, but we are in a new world in which higher and tertiary education is involving more and more of our citizens. Allowing institutions to decide which courses they teach and to be in control of how they deal with their academic staff and their students is absolutely critical to their ability to maintain standards and retain the autonomy that has served us very well.

[Baroness Blackstone (Lab)]

My Lords, I, too, strongly support the amendment in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Kerslake, which is extremely well worded and very appropriate for the legislation in front of us. I am absolutely convinced that the current Minister responsible for higher education will respect the institutional autonomy of universities, but some future Minister may not. As a former Minister responsible for higher and further education, I was rightly constrained by the 1988 Act and what Lord Jenkins managed to do with his amendment. There were sometimes times when I did not agree with what was happening, but I was unable to interfere, which would have been wholly inappropriate. That is an extremely good thing.

There is a second reason why I support the noble Lord’s amendment. I, along with Jo Ritzen, a very distinguished former Dutch Minister of Higher Education, and two other former European Education Ministers—Eduardo Grilo from Portugal and the former Hungarian Education Minister—embarked on a project led by Jo Ritzen entitled Empower European Universities. It looked at the position of universities across Europe—north, south, east and west—in particular at some of the problems some universities in eastern Europe experience, as in southern Europe. There was an incredible amount of state control over what these institutions could do. One of the outcomes of that is you get no innovation. Therefore, one of the reasons why we should promote autonomy in our higher education institutions is that we should be concerned to make sure universities do not stand still, that they take into account a changed environment and that they are innovative. By being autonomous they are far more likely to be innovative than if they are controlled by Governments, as we saw from the project we did across Europe.

[Lord Lucas (Con)]

My Lords, I join those who like Amendment 65, as my noble friend Lord Willetts predicted I would. I join him in saying that I do not share the fears expressed in Amendment 2. To take the example of BPP, which is the company that trained me as an accountant, it has been going a long time. It is the first among equals of a group of companies that have grown up providing professional training services to some very demanding customers. It has therefore developed an ethos of providing very good courses. It also sponsors women’s football, which I am grateful for. It has a broad and very encouraging ethos, which thoroughly justifies its status.

We have to be very careful about the quality of what is provided to students. Noble Lords will no doubt remember Ian Livingstone’s Next Gen report on training for the computer games industry. It found that 85% of courses provided by British universities were not up to scratch. We need to do a lot in the Bill and otherwise to provide students with better information about the quality of their courses, but the people who can demonstrate the best track record in this, who have the best sets of information and who have the most demanding customers are these commercial training companies and those who have come up by that route. We should not be frightened in any way by the fact that they are for profit. Despite that, they have proved that they can provide excellent education.

Higher Education and Research Bill

Baroness Blackstone Excerpts

Committee: 1st sitting (Hansard): House of Lords
Monday 9th January 2017 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Blackstone (Lab)]

My Lords, I want to speak very briefly at what I assume is getting towards the end of an interesting debate. What worries Members of this House most about the Bill are the clauses about new providers, and my noble friend Lady Warwick made this very clear in her excellent speech. We have a system of higher education in this country that is highly regarded all over the world. We have many great universities from the point of view of research but we also have many great universities from the point of view of the quality of their teaching and the advanced vocational training that they provide. We do not want this great system undermined by too easily recognising new institutions and giving them degree-awarding powers before they have been through a proper probationary period, in which they are associated with existing institutions that will support their development and growth and help them gain the capacity to become institutions of higher education that we can recognise, embrace and support. That is at the centre of the concerns that have led to a wish to place at the front of the Bill a set of propositions about what constitutes not just a good university but a good system of higher education.

The other point I want to make is that for many, many decades, higher education has embraced not only universities but many other kinds of institution. Some of what has been said when discussing the question of whether or not universities should cover a wide range of disciplines has not quite taken into account the fact that there are specialist institutions that have for a long time, as I have said, not been defined as universities. In some ways, I think we may have made a mistake in deciding that some of these specialist institutions should now be called universities. Looking back, we see that colleges of education, medical schools, music conservatoires, specialist arts colleges and, as the noble Lord, Lord Willetts, mentioned, the Royal Agricultural College, were not defined as universities but as being part of a system of higher education. We might be able to bring some new specialist institutions in, but they should not necessarily—at least not at the beginning of their existence—be called universities.

Most people understand that the concept of a university covers a range of disciplines, allows academics to mix with colleagues from a wide range of subjects and allows students to work not just with those studying exactly the same subjects as themselves but with students studying a wide range of subjects.

There is, in a sense, a bit of a contradiction in this legislation. One principle of all good legislation is that it should be internally consistent and its parts make up the whole in a way that is appropriate and easily understood. On the one hand, Part 3 of the Bill is asking for an umbrella body—UKRI, which would cover all areas of research—in order, we are told, to ensure that there is cross-disciplinary research rather than researchers being in separate little boxes not communicating with each other. That is what good universities do. They are institutions that look at a particular intellectual problem from a variety of different disciplinary perspectives and try to solve that problem. That is why some of the institutions that I mentioned earlier are to me higher education institutions, but they are not universities as normally understood.

To pick up what the noble Lord, Lord Sutherland, said a little earlier, what we should be doing now is not to try to define what a university is, because this Bill should not just be about universities. They are the main provider of higher education, but they may not be the sole providers. Rather we should start with something that sets out what the principles of good, strong, high-quality higher education should be. Of course, that should cover institutional autonomy, freedom of expression, academic freedom and a whole variety of other things that are mentioned in the amendment. But the way in which it has been framed at the moment leads to a certain concern that it is not definitionally perfect.

Will the Minister consider coming back to the House with a new amendment to start this Bill off that covers the sort of issues in the amendment tabled by my noble friend Lord Stevenson, and Cross-Bench and Liberal Democrat supporters? That would reassure us a little that the Government are concerned about these principles and will not rush into a set of legislative changes that will undermine the quality of our higher education system by bringing in new providers that will not meet these principles.

[Lord Brown of Eaton-under-Heywood (CB)]

I speak as a lawyer, not as an academic. Indeed, until recently I thought that I was the only Member of the House who has not ever been a governor, chancellor or vice-chancellor of one of these institutions. As my noble friend Lady Wolf has now twice explained, the only direct relevance of this proposed new clause goes to the title of the body in question. In short, it goes only to Clauses 51 to 55 of the Bill. I understand her concern to be with regard to bodies being allowed to be called universities. Effect would be given to that if one said at the start of this new proposed clause: “For the purposes of Clauses 51 to 55, a higher education institution”—because that is what the whole of the rest of the Bill is about, assiduously avoiding any distinction between universities and those such bodies that are not—“should be regarded as entitled to use the title of university if it is an autonomous institution”, to return to the language of Amendment 1, et cetera.

With the best will in the world, although it seems to be the opinion of many in the House that the amendment will affect the view generally as to the autonomous nature of these institutions, as drafted it will not. It goes only to the title. It does not go even to the degree-awarding powers. That has nothing to do with whether a body is or is not called a university. Therefore it is much more appropriate, when concerned not with the title but with the autonomy of these higher educational institutions, to look at the amendments to which others have referred, Amendments 65 and 165, which deal not only with universities but with all higher education institutions.

If we want to give universities some special status, which this Bill as drafted at the moment assiduously does not, we have to recast the thing as a whole and say, “If you are a university, not only will you be able to call yourself such but these consequences follow”.

Higher Education and Research Bill

Baroness Blackstone Excerpts

2nd reading (Hansard): House of Lords
Tuesday 6th December 2016 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Blackstone (Lab)]

My Lords, like, I suspect, other speakers in this Second Reading debate, I faced a dilemma about what I should say. With an advisory time of only five minutes, it really is impossible to do the Bill justice. In the Second Reading of the 1992 Bill, there were 37 speakers; today’s 70 speakers reflects the fact that this House is now too big to do its work in a sensible way.

That said, I cannot cover Part 3 of the Bill on research, other than to broadly welcome the new structure. However, like the noble Lord, Lord Waldegrave, I feel that reassurance is needed about its operation, especially with respect to the autonomy of the individual research councils. I can only put down a marker about aspects of fees and loans as they affect students, about which I have grave reservations. I have no time either to get into quality and standards and the issues they pose for individual autonomy, important as they are.

I will focus on three aspects of Part 1 of the Bill— the Government’s aim of seeking new providers; the introduction of the TEF; and the promotion of equal opportunities.

I am surprised the Government are setting so much store on new providers. UK higher education is admired internationally, as many speakers have already said, for its diversity and range of provision, its high-quality research, its efficiency and its generally high standards. Universities range from institutions characterised by their world-class research, to those with a wide variety of vocational degrees, to small conservatoires. There is already fierce competition in the sector for research funds, for international students, for the best academic staff recruited globally and for collaboration with business and industry. Students are already faced with so much choice that they often find it difficult to decide what to do and where to go. Like the noble Lord, Lord Sutherland, I have no objection to new providers per se. I just do not understand why introducing them is the central purpose of the Bill. I suspect that an ideological obsession with the marketplace is behind it.

Moreover, the Bill’s proposals threaten standards, potentially diminishing our international reputation and leaving students studying at new providers in difficulty. I refer to the clauses which allow the Office for Students to give degree-awarding powers on a probationary basis. There should be a high bar for new entrants but the Bill does not provide one. Like the Government, I am in favour of expansion. However, surely it would be better to increase places in tried and tested institutions which already have the necessary infrastructure to provide for a positive student experience.

On the TEF, I, like others, welcome the emphasis on teaching. Students are paying high fees and they deserve inspiring teaching which helps them reach their potential. However, I am worried about how the TEF is to be implemented. Can it avoid a costly and bureaucratic system of measuring teaching quality? What opportunity will be provided to scrutinise the metrics to be used with respect to their validity and reliability?

Can the Minister confirm that the crude ratings of gold, silver and bronze, to which others have referred, will not be used by the Home Office in deciding on the student visa system and how it is implemented?

Turning to social mobility and access to universities, the White Paper was admirably bold in its commitment to increasing access from low-income groups. As it admitted, there is still too large a gap between those from the poorest areas and those from wealthy areas in gaining admission. Were the Government serious about the White Paper’s commitment, the Bill would have specified a duty on the Office for Students to promote adult part-time and life-long learning which helps disadvantaged groups. There is nothing in the Bill about this, which is a great shame.

Secondly, the Bill should have provided more clarity about the role of the Director for Fair Access and Participation. At present, all the Bill requires of him or her is to report on the performance of the Office for Students in this area. He or she also needs to retain the authority that he or she has had in the past to approve or refuse a university’s access or participation plan. Can the Minister say why this is not in the Bill? Omitting it suggests that the Government now attach less priority to this area.

Important changes to the Bill are needed before it leaves this House. I hope the Government will listen in the interests of preserving the global reputation of UK higher education.

Brexit: Impact on Universities and Scientific Research

Baroness Blackstone Excerpts

Thursday 3rd November 2016 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Blackstone (Lab)]

My Lords, I declare an interest as I chair the board of Great Ormond Street Hospital, which undertakes a great deal of research.

One of the strengths of the UK is its universities. We have a world-class system of higher education which is admired around the world. The high status of our system is something we must preserve. The decision to leave the EU is a potential threat to this. There may be some opportunities, as the noble Lord, Lord Willetts, has just said, but there are many threats as well. One of the benefits of our membership is the opportunity to attract students from the European Union. There are currently 185,000 studying here. This has been possible for them through access to fee loans. Will the same guarantee of access given to students coming here from Europe in 2017-18 be given to those coming here in 2018-19? Will the Minister tell the House what will happen after that? The loss of these students would damage the rich and diverse population in UK universities.

European Union nationals account for about 16% of the academic workforce here. Incidentally, the figure is much higher in some important subjects—for example, mathematics and economics. What reassurances will be given to them? Will they continue to come if there are complex bureaucratic hurdles to contend with? They are at present attracted by the values of openness to the wider world and the quality of research in our universities, to which many of them make an enormous contribution. What assurances can the Minister give that academic mobility—not just student mobility—from Europe will not be impeded after our exit?

Almost half of UK academic papers are written in collaboration with at least one international partner, many from the European Union, and international co-authorship is associated with 41% more impact. The UK is easily the largest beneficiary of EU Research Council funding, obtaining 22% of its grants. This underlines our success in research. As Jo Johnson, the Minister responsible for this area, said earlier this year:

“Britain’s success as a science powerhouse hinges on our ability to collaborate with the best minds from across Europe and the world”.

He was right; it does. Therefore, will the Minister tell us not just that the Government will work to protect the UK’s position for the duration of Horizon 2020? Universities are desperately concerned about the longer-term future beyond Horizon 2020. They expect a response, and they should get one. Given how much money comes into the UK for research, it deserves high priority in any exit negotiations, which need to consider how we can go on having high-level strategic influence as well as funding.

As regards medical research, issues of scope and scale are particularly important. High-quality medical research is vital to innovation in the treatment of patients, in both discovering cures and making sure that their symptoms are alleviated so that they have a better quality of life. Limiting the scope of this research would damage patients, so access to EU funding in this area is not just about money, but about the facilitation of networks, as I think the noble Lord, Lord Willetts, also mentioned, and access to pan-European populations. This is especially true with rare diseases, 75% of which affect children, and 30% of children with a rare disease will die before their fifth birthday. To save the lives of these children it is vital to have collaborative projects which expand the population size from which patients can be drawn across Europe for the clinical trials which are needed. At Great Ormond Street Hospital and the Institute of Child Health of University College London, where, incidentally, 25% of the medical staff are from the European Union, there are currently 44 EU-funded research trials. What do the Government plan to do in the longer term—I stress the longer term—to ensure that these cross-European trials can continue?

With more time I could cite many examples where this research is now benefiting children with rare complex conditions. Surely we owe it to them to ensure that this continues.

--- Later in debate ---

[Viscount Younger of Leckie]

It is a question that has been raised in the debate. I cannot give any further reassurances on that, but I and other Ministers have laid out exactly where we are at the moment. Clearly, discussions are under way. I am sure all will become clear.

I listened carefully to the speech of the noble Lord, Lord Broers, about innovation. He is right to distinguish between curiosity, or pure research, and research-linked productivity and industry. We will discuss these important matters when we discuss the Higher Education and Research Bill.

The Chancellor also confirmed that structural and investment fund projects signed before the UK departs the EU will also be guaranteed by the Treasury after we leave. Funding for structural and investment projects will be honoured by the Treasury, so long as they meet the value-for-money criteria and are in line with domestic strategic priorities.

To reassure EU students planning to come to study in the UK, we have announced that the rules regarding the student loans that EU nationals receive from the Student Loans Company are unchanged and remain in force. Therefore, current EU students and those starting courses in the 2016-17 and 2017-18 academic years who are eligible for student support will continue to be able to access this support for the duration of their course, even if this continues after we have left the EU. Student Finance England will assess these applications against existing eligibility criteria, and will provide support in the normal way.

[Baroness Blackstone]

My Lords, a number of contributors to the debate asked whether the Minister could say what will happen in 2018-19, which is likely to be before the UK exits the European Union, and after that. The Minister has given no answer to either of those questions.

[Viscount Younger of Leckie]

That is true. I am unable to give an answer; I can be candid about that. However, I reassure the noble Baroness that this is a very important point and that these matters are being discussed and will continue to be discussed as we move forward in this particularly challenging process.

We are also grateful to the European Commission for the swift reassurances it has provided. Commissioner Moedas said in July this year:

“As long as the UK is a member of the European Union, EU law continues to apply and the UK retains all rights and obligations of a member state”.

This means that we still have the same terms of access to European research funding, such as Horizon 2020, for as long as we are still a member of the EU.

Al-Madinah Free School

Baroness Blackstone Excerpts

Thursday 17th October 2013 Lords Chamber

[Lord Nash]

My Lords, there are plenty of teachers in schools up and down the country who do not have formal qualifications and are doing an excellent job, but we ensure through Ofsted that teaching in these schools is good, and we will ensure that the governance and leadership of these schools is appropriate.

[Baroness Blackstone (Lab)]

The noble Lord’s answer to that question was somewhat complacent. For many years we have struggled in this country to ensure that teachers in primary and secondary schools that are state funded have proper qualifications. To allow these schools to be set up with teachers who do not have such qualifications is an invitation to problems. Will he not give a guarantee that he and his Secretary of State will reconsider their policy of allowing these schools to be established and continue in operation without qualified teachers in every case?

[Lord Nash]

I am afraid that I cannot give that guarantee. We will guarantee to ensure that the leadership and management of these schools, and teachers teaching within them, are appropriate. But I am afraid, given the state of our school system that we inherited—