Higher Education

Baroness Wolf of Dulwich Excerpts

Thursday 7th March 2024 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Wolf of Dulwich (CB)]

My Lords, I congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Blunkett, on securing this important debate, at a time when the university sector is under enormous pressure. He has rightly drawn our attention to the role of universities in growth, productivity and levelling up. This reflects the increasing tendency, at all levels of education, to discuss what we do in terms of the economy.

Universities have always been about training people for jobs, long before growth was seen as a central concern of Governments. Universities are indeed central to growth, productivity and levelling up. Without them, we would not have the levels of innovation and wealth that we do, or the genuinely improved opportunities—although they are not as great as they might be—for our young people.

I will use my short time in this debate to utter some words of warning and concern about our enthusiastic embrace of universities as engines of growth. There is a real danger, not just in this country but throughout the world, that a simplified understanding of this relationship and of what it means for government policy is a genuine threat to university excellence. It leads Governments down a path which does not deliver what they hope it will and leads to some reactions that we might wish to avoid.

Especially once the wonderful years straight after the Second World War came to an end and productivity suddenly started to be problematic—rather than something that just seemed to be happening and growing right, left and centre—Governments, intellectuals, academics and politicians cast around for some way of turbocharging growth. All over the world, they came to the conclusion that education was the answer—the more people we educated for longer and the more graduates we had, the more the economy would grow. It is true, I repeat, that without a highly qualified and well-educated population you cannot have a modern and innovative economy. But what has also happened is that we have all been rather disappointed: all over the world, there has been a huge increase and expansion in graduate numbers, but somehow growth has remained anaemic and productivity is not going in the directions we want.

All over the world, as the university sector gets larger and larger, resource per student tends to go down, and there are also some really concerning results: degrees become barriers to entry and you cannot get a job that you used to be able to get without a degree unless you have one. We should be very aware of this danger because it is starting to have a real impact on the way that Governments deal with the university sector in ways that threaten its ability to deliver the innovation and the type of education that we all value.

Australia, for example, having failed with one set of very complicated differential fees, is now about to introduce another set, which will apparently be based on the future contributions to the economy of different degrees—so this is not just a British disease. It has been true here, in the United States and elsewhere that we have focused more and more on whether individuals earn a lot from a particular degree. This is being hard-baked into our regulatory and accountability regime. We should take a deep breath and ask whether this is sensible, any more than it was sensible to believe that you would guarantee an uptick in economic growth simply by increasing the number of students.

Individual salaries depend on a very large number of things. They depend, for example, on whether you go into an occupation like nursing, where your wage is set not by a market but by a Government. They depend on which institution you went to and on the sort of occupation you go into. They also depend—this comes to levelling up—on where you are. You will not earn as much if you study in the north-east and stay there as if you study in the south-east and stay there—although actually you might be as well off, given house prices. But as a tool for steering, regulating and changing the higher education system, the way we have doubled down on the idea that we must look at whether a degree delivers growth—and that, if it does, it will deliver salaries—is very concerning. As well as celebrating the role of universities, I hope we will pay careful attention to some of the unfortunate consequences of focusing too much on growth.

Skill Shortages in Business and Industry

Baroness Wolf of Dulwich Excerpts

Wednesday 28th February 2024 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Barran (Con)]

I have already talked about some of the things we are doing. It is important that people know what options and opportunities are available in their local area, and the LSIPs are critical for that. In particular, the Government have invested up to £300 million in a network of 21 institutes of technology, which are providing exactly the kind of higher technical education to which the noble Lord refers.

[Baroness Wolf of Dulwich (CB)]

My Lords, the Government’s figures indicate that fewer than one apprenticeship in five is in a shortage occupation. Given those figures, is it really plausible that no changes are needed in the apprenticeship levy?

[Baroness Barran (Con)]

I hope I did not suggest that no changes are needed. What employers need and want is a degree of stability in the apprenticeship system. We have done a huge amount of work, and the noble Baroness has been a critical part of achieving that, in improving our apprenticeships system. I am not suggesting that there is not some tweaking required—the noble Baroness is a great expert on that. Broadly, stability for our employers is vital, so that they know how they can use the levy and that it will be here to stay.

Lifelong Learning (Higher Education Fee Limits) Bill

Baroness Wolf of Dulwich Excerpts

3rd reading
Tuesday 12th September 2023 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Garden of Frognal (LD)]

My Lords, I apologise profusely to the House for arriving after the Minister started speaking; business moved much more quickly than I expected.

From these Benches, I thank the Minister and the Bill team very much for all their work on the Bill. We remain concerned about how many adults will wish to take on debt in order to improve their learning, and we look forward to hearing updates from the Minister about how many people have done so. From these Benches, we feel that grants would be a much more effective way of persuading adults to learn. But, of course, we are all totally in favour of lifelong learning, and we wish the Bill well.

[Baroness Wolf of Dulwich (CB)]

My Lords, as many of you will know, the number 1 recommendation of the Augar review of post-18 education and funding was for this sort of reform. As someone who was a member of that review and who has spent a considerable part of the last three and a half years on secondment to government to work on the Augar review proposals, among other things, I take this opportunity to thank everyone involved.

I have been jinxed: I have not managed to contribute to any of the fine and informative debates that have taken place on this. They have highlighted some of the challenges that lie ahead. I am enormously encouraged by the cross-party support for the principle of a funding system that genuinely takes us forward into not just the 21st century but a future where post-compulsory lifelong learning is the rule, not the exception. We now have an opportunity to build on this.

I thank everyone involved in the drafting and passing of the Bill—although we have not quite passed it yet. I particularly put on record my appreciation of the work put in by a large number of officials who have worked enormously hard on this—on teasing out the policy implications and on minimising the amount that had to be put into primary legislation. I thank them and the Minister for her support. It is a little miraculous that we have moved from a major recommendation in 2019 to putting this reform on its way to implementation in 2023. So, on behalf of the Augar review team—and, I think, all the future students of this country—I thank everyone involved in this reform.

Bill passed.

Teacher Vacancies

Baroness Wolf of Dulwich Excerpts

Thursday 13th July 2023 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Barran (Con)]

I talk to a lot of schools and trusts, and I absolutely accept that there are particular areas and subjects where recruitment feels really hard at the moment. But I do not accept that this is the highest figure of leavers ever—I have the numbers in front of me. The trend over the past 10 years is pretty stable. It is only fair to look at the facts and to use the facts. I think that most parents feel that teachers go above and beyond to give their children a great education. The work that we have done to improve the curriculum over the past 10 years is a really important part of that.

[Baroness Wolf of Dulwich (CB)]

My Lords, teacher shortages in specialist subjects and short-lived responses have been common for decades. Shortages are also currently chronic in many other countries, notably France, Switzerland and Australia. Can the Minister inform us whether the Department for Education is conducting an in-depth review of the long list of previous short-lived policy responses or examining how other countries are responding to comparable shortages?

[Baroness Barran (Con)]

I am not aware that we are compiling a list of short-lived responses. We are committed to introducing improvements to the system that are based on evidence, such as the payments to early-career teachers in specialist subjects and the improvements that we have made to the early-career framework, which we introduced in 2021, providing mentors for every single early-career teacher. We are committed to building on those policies, including in relation to continuing professional development being a core part of every teacher’s experience in future.

Skills and Post-16 Education Bill [HL]

Baroness Wolf of Dulwich Excerpts

Consideration of Commons amendments
Thursday 24th March 2022 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Wolf of Dulwich (Non-Afl)]

My Lords, I declare an interest because, as the noble Lord, Lord Blunkett, pointed out, I am currently working as a skills adviser at No. 10. I was therefore quite involved in the skills White Paper, which led to much of the legislation today.

I very much appreciate the interest the House has taken in this Bill. Like the noble Lord, Lord Baker, and many other noble Lords, I have been bashing away at skills and vocational education for many years. It is wonderful to see that it is now a subject of such importance to so many of you.

I will say something about the local skills improvement plans and Motions 4, 4A and 4B. There is a danger that we are losing sight of what these were meant to be, can and should do, and what the White Paper set out to do. They were meant to be a simple way to create a stable mechanism to make sure that local employers’ voices and insights would be brought together and made available to providers. Colleges do not have to follow these plans in detail; they just have to take note of them. I am concerned that, with the best of motives, we are in danger of creating a vast, complex and bureaucratic process that will not do what it was meant to do, which was to take employers into account but also to reverse the 20-year trend of colleges and providers generally spending all their time worrying about ticking boxes for Whitehall and whether they have met regulations and requirements, but far too little time looking out to their local communities.

I put it on record that I am also bemused by why six pages of dense text are needed to put this simple idea into legislation. I am genuinely concerned that, in trying to enforce something that says, “You must take account of schools, and of this and that”, instead of creating a simple mechanism for employers to be part of the thinking about what is provided in a locality, we will create a new series of tick boxes.

I raise a question particularly on independent training providers, because I simply do not see how this will work. Independent training providers range from huge national providers, which are dominant in apprenticeship sectors, to tiny commercial companies of literally two people in a room above a chip shop. I tried to get my head around how you would take their views into account, when many of them are commercial concerns in determined competition with each other. I really wonder whether this will achieve what people want it to.

As I said, I take this opportunity to say, first, how very much I think the Bill and the support expressed for its purposes show how this country has moved on and really understood the importance of this, but also that local skills improvement plans are meant to be simple. They are meant to be not tick-box or expensive bureaucratic exercises but a way to ensure that employers are part of a process. They are something of which to take account, not an attempt to introduce central planning into what colleges decide to put on.

[Baroness Blackstone (Ind Lab)]

My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow the noble Baroness, Lady Wolf, who has fought so hard for the skills agenda. I associate myself with much of that fight and I very much welcome a great deal of what is in the Bill. However, I will say a few words in favour of Amendments 15A and 15B. All the key points on these amendments have already been made very eloquently by my noble friends Lord Blunkett and Lord Watson, and the noble Lord, Lord Baker. I strongly support the arguments they put forward and I will underline three points.

First, it is true that too many qualifications can be confusing. I have no doubt about that, so I understand what the Government are trying to do here. Nevertheless, I think they have got it wrong. There is no confusion about BTECs. They have been going for nearly 40 years. They are long established and well tried and tested. They play a really important role in the range of qualifications at level 3. It is particularly important that they combine the development of skills with academic learning. They are the only qualification focused entirely on that.

For all the positive aspects of T-levels, they do not do this. They are mainly designed to help those enrolled on them to become successful in specific occupations. Again, I do not want in any way to criticise their introduction—that is an important role—but BTECs allow those who are successful in completing them to go into higher education and in particular to take applied vocational degrees, of which there are many, or into the workplace, or, in some cases, into both, because there are quite a lot of part-time students at BTEC level. Therefore, they should not be ditched to try to bolster T-levels. It is not necessary to do that. I know the Minister has indicated that there are certain niche areas where they will survive, but they should survive as a whole. Moreover, as the noble Lord, Lord Baker, said, we need some time to see how T-levels bed down, who they are successful for, who is attracted to them and whether they are really working for employers.

That is my first point. My second is that the Government seem to have ignored the results and outcomes of their own consultations. Some 86% of respondents to its level 3 consultation disagreed with the proposal to remove funding from qualifications deemed to overlap with A-levels and T-levels. As has been said by the noble Lord, Lord Baker, there is a big issue about what is meant by “overlapping”. The fact their content might be the same does not mean that the approach to teaching and learning is the same. In fact, they are profoundly different. Neither of the two reviews the Government have cited, one undertaken by the noble Baroness, Lady Wolf, favoured the Government’s approach. In her review, the noble Baroness recognised the value of BTECs, and the Sainsbury review did not cover BTECs at all because they were not part of its remit.

My third point is that abandoning BTECs is likely to severely damage social mobility. It will block a route to university or skilled employment for large numbers of disadvantaged young people. This is reinforced by the evidence of the Social Market Foundation that 44% of white working-class students who entered universities studied at least one BTEC. I am familiar with this from my past role as a vice-chancellor. Many of these students do extraordinarily well when they get to university, often better than those who come in with rather poor A-level qualifications. As I think the noble Lord, Lord Baker, mentioned, 37% of black students went to university with only BTEC qualifications. Surely we should not block the route of these young ethnic-minority students into our higher education system by taking away a qualification deemed valuable for them.

Skills and Post-16 Education Bill [HL]

Baroness Wolf of Dulwich Excerpts

Report stage
Thursday 21st October 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord Storey (LD)]

My Lords, I rise to speak on the issue of essay mills and contract cheating. I thank the Minister for tabling this amendment. There have been four Private Members’ Bills, three of them from me. The first time, I drew number 2, and then there was then a general election. I then drew number 50, which never got debated, and then I drew number 3—and we have the Private Member’s Bill up and running. I thank Chris Skidmore for putting one in the Commons as well.

More than 45 vice-chancellors and heads of UK higher education organisations wrote to the Secretary of State in 2018. The support and briefings of the Quality Assurance Agency for Higher Education have been fantastic. I also pay tribute to two professors who started this whole thing off before I got involved: Professor Newton and Professor Draper at Swansea University.

When I looked at a particular independent college in Greenwich and saw the effects of contract cheating and essay mills, I realised that this was a very serious problem that we faced not just in further education but in higher education and, increasingly, in schools as well, although this amendment does not deal with that. Some 15% of our students admit to using contract cheating services. Oxbridge Essays claims that it has produced, for cheating, 70,000 essays. This is not just about students being drawn into this situation—many of them are worried about their well-being, their mental state et cetera—it is also about the academic credibility of our higher education system. If we allowed this cancer to grow, it will affect our universities and colleges.

I pay tribute to the Minister’s legal team, which has nailed this properly. I showed the amendment to a number of people, and, as you can imagine, I got some quite important replies. They said that the proposed strict liability offence—whereby there is no need to prove intent—is really important because it means that essay mills will not be able to rely on disclaimers, although they do have a due diligence defence. Getting strict liability offences through Parliament is extremely rare, but it is absolutely critical to this offence having any impact.

I would also like in passing to congratulate the Minister’s press department or PR department. The Minister very kindly emailed me her intended amendment and it said, “Strictly embargoed for four days”. I thought after the third day I would tip off the Times Higher Education Supplement or FE Weekly so I might get a little bit of credit, and they said “Oh, we got it four days ago”. The Government obviously have an eye on publicity as well.

I thank the Government for this amendment. Students, vice-chancellors and universities up and down the country will be very grateful. This is not the end of it, in the sense that we have to make sure that we look at Wales and Scotland, because that is important, and we will at some stage need to look at secondary education as well. When the Minister winds up, will she consider saying that if breaches occur, we will look at how we can tighten up the situation? I am sure that these essay mills, which form a £1 billion industry, will be looking at ways around this, and we need to see whether we can find ways to stop breaches happening in future. I hope the House does not mind, but I am going to depart.

[Baroness Wolf of Dulwich (Non-Afl)]

My Lords, I, too, strongly welcome the amendments tabled in the names of the noble Baroness, Lady Barran, and the noble Lord, Lord Storey, which seek to address the pernicious effects of essay mills. I must declare an interest as an adviser on skills to the Prime Minister and as an academic employee of King’s College London. That is why I want to take this opportunity to say how important and welcome these amendments are. I pay particular tribute to the noble Lord, Lord Storey, who has been passionate and determined. Without his recognition that this is a major and serious issue which can be tackled, I am sure that these amendments would not have been tabled tonight.

There are a number of reasons why cheating has become a major problem for universities. It is partly to do with the pressure on people to get formal qualifications, the scale of universities and the temptation—you can do things you could not do before. There are two major sources of this. One is plagiarism, where we can fight software with software, and one is essay mills, where we cannot. I am quite sure that there will be a major improvement as a result of these measures: the firms will be unable to operate and students will take much more note of the risks attached to doing something illegal with these measures in place. The noble Lord, Lord Storey, has escaped, so I will send thanks in his direction. I say on behalf teaching academics all over the country that they will be extremely happy to see these amendments to the Bill, because it is almost impossible to know if somebody has used a commissioned essay.

[Baroness Sherlock (Lab)]

My Lords, I thank the Minister for introducing the government amendments and all noble Lords who have spoken. I shall say a brief word on government Amendments 58 and 72, on religious academies. When my noble friend Lord Touhig raised this matter in Committee, my noble friend Lady Wilcox made clear our support for his endeavour, so it is good to see the Government responding positively by bringing forward on Report their own amendments to address the problem. I congratulate my noble friend Lord Touhig. Given how long this has seemingly been worked on, I hope that at least one academy, the Lord Touhig catholic academy, will be appearing any day now to mark his success. I am going to ask him to put his name to my amendments in future, in the hope it will have a similarly positive effect on the Minister on future subjects. I look forward to his support. These amendments are very welcome.

Turning to the remaining government amendments in this group on essay mills, as I made clear in Committee, we fully support the outlawing of cheating services. Having had to research this matter for one of the many Private Member’s Bills proposed by the noble Lord, Lord Storey—I had only just taken the brief on—I was shocked to find how comprehensive the available services are. I think I have regaled the House more than once with my story about commissioning imaginary essays on Augustine and the problem of evil and various other things, and being astonished to find the precision with which one could request services. There was even a “comparethemarket.com” for it. The whole thing is extraordinary.

I have a small number of questions, and I apologise, but given the amendments have been brought forward on Report, we have not had an opportunity to ask about them, so I hope the Minister will bear with me.

First, one of the conditions is that material provided to a student has to have been prepared in connection with the assignment, rather than published generally. One of the abuses of the current system has been essay mills selling the same essay to more than one student, as the same topic comes up again and again. If material had been prepared for one student and was then resold to 15 more, is that one offence or is each sale an offence?

Secondly, the policy note talks about committing offences in England and Wales. What does that mean? Does it mean that the website is hosted in England or Wales, that the company that owns it is registered there or that the owners and essay writers live there? Who commits the offence? Is it the person writing the essay, the one promoting the service, the staff, the owners or all of them?

I have two other quick questions. We are told that enforcement of the law will fall to the police and the CPS. Given the pressures on both, do the Government have a sense of how many prosecutions, if any, are likely in a typical year or will this rely on deterrence as a way forward?

Finally, the penalty on conviction is a fine. I sought clarification offline as to the likely scale of this and was told simply that this will be determined by the courts in accordance with Sentencing Council guidelines, with no cap on the powers of magistrates to issue fines. When I have had to deal with these things on Bills before, I have normally been given some kind of heads-up about the likely tariff or scale from the Government Benches, so can the Minister give us an idea? Are we talking about £50, £5,000, £50,000 or £5 million, or something relating to the profitability of the company? Can she give us some sort of heads-up or a rough benchmark?

I commend the Government for acting on both these points and look forward to the Minister’s reply.