Higher Education and Research Bill

Debate between Lord Smith of Finsbury and Lord Winston

Report: 4th sitting (Hansard): House of Lords
Wednesday 15th March 2017 Lords Chamber

[Lord Smith of Finsbury]

First, briefly to address the point from the noble Lord, Lord Winston, even though UKRI may have no direct funding responsibility in relation to conservatoires, it can none the less play a useful role in making a joint decision, and I do not think that diminishes in any way the research standing of the conservatoires.

[Lord Winston]

I do not want to delay this debate any longer, but I am still puzzled by this. A huge number of research degrees are master’s degrees with a research component. Of course, they are often not funded by research councils; sometimes they are, but sometimes they are not. Where do they stand with relation to this proposal? I would like a bit of clarity about it.

[Lord Smith of Finsbury]

I do not think that our amendment would make any substantive difference from the position under the provisions of the Bill. It simply means that UKRI is part of the process alongside the Office for Students.

In relation to UKRI, the Minister has shown in our discussions much wisdom and willingness to take on board points made from all sides of the House. This is only to be expected from an alumnus of Pembroke College. However, on this particular issue, about research degree-awarding powers, he says that we are dancing on the head of a pin. I do not think that we are. There is a fundamental difference between having a statutory duty to give advice and for that advice to be considered, and taking a joint decision. There is a world of difference between those two. The question is who has the ultimate authority, who has the subsequent accountability and whether we can, by making this a joint decision, give reassurance to many of our leading research universities, which have expressed concern. As I said earlier, the body that knows about students and the body that knows about research should both be involved in the decision about whether to give research degree-awarding powers, and they should make that decision jointly. It would be useful to test the opinion of the House.

Higher Education and Research Bill

Debate between Lord Smith of Finsbury and Lord Winston

Report: 2nd sitting (Hansard): House of Lords
Wednesday 8th March 2017 Lords Chamber

[Lord Winston (Lab)]

I, too, support this group of amendments. Rather bizarrely, just as this debate started—it is not because he knew that I was sitting in the Chamber or would be talking about higher education—I had an email from Professor Colin Lawson of the Royal College of Music to tell me that the Royal College of Music has just been rated second in the world for music education. He says, “Notwithstanding my disdain for these rankings, this is something I am very pleased with”.

There is a real issue here. To follow up on what the noble Lord, Lord Lipsey, said, it is utterly ridiculous to suggest that you can assess arts teaching by this kind of approach of rankings. Music is interpreted in all sorts of ways. Just as art colleges are rather similar—I believe that drama colleges are as well—all sorts of endeavours such as this cannot be rated in the way that the Government propose. This is extremely dangerous, particularly for the conservatoire, which attracts a large proportion of its students from Asia and depends very much on them.

Perhaps I may briefly declare an interest. I am professor of science and society at Imperial College. The reason I was not involved so much in Committee is that I had been teaching in schools on behalf of the university in Lancashire, Yorkshire, Derbyshire, Lincoln and Avon in the same week as the Committee stage and trying to get back to London in time on the train service, which is rather difficult. We teach practical science in the reach-out lab and have had PhD students coming through assessing the teaching. It is very clear that it is one thing to be able to assess learning, but teaching assessment is extremely complex. None of the ways in which we are doing this at the moment is nearly adequate. It is a major problem, because if we get it wrong the risk of damage in these cases is massive.

I shall give just one example, because I recognise that this is the Report stage. Some years ago, on two occasions, I ran a free communications course for students at Imperial College. The courses lasted for one and two days, students signed up on a first come, first served basis, and they were massively oversubscribed because undergraduates wanted to learn how they could communicate their science better. What was really interesting—I do not say this in my favour—was that the British and EU students almost universally gave us a rating of nine or 10 on the assessment of the course afterwards. The Chinese and other Asian students were not giving us anything like that rating: they gave us four, five or six, averaging about five. The reason for this, when we did a questionnaire with them, was that, unlike the British students, they said, “This is not going to get me a job anywhere; this is not going to be of any value to me commercially”. Yet, of course, in terms of the education of a student, it is vital.

I beg the Government to think about this rating system extremely carefully. If we get this wrong, we will damage not only the very top universities but other universities that are coming up at present. That would be a disaster for the United Kingdom and for our education.

[Lord Smith of Finsbury (Non-Afl)]

My Lords, I support the amendments moved by the noble Duke and spoken to by the noble Lord. I declare my interest as Master of Pembroke College in Cambridge. I want to make three very quick points.

First, everyone on all sides of the House agrees on the importance of promoting the excellence of teaching in universities. The emphasis that the creation of the teaching excellence framework places on teaching to sit alongside research as the benchmarks of what universities should be all about is something that we all want to welcome, but the practicalities of how the Government are going about it leave, to my mind, something to be desired.

Secondly, there is going to be an inevitable crudity about the metrics that are used. The metrics that the Government are suggesting now are somewhat better than those that originally appeared in the Government’s Green Paper, but none the less they are still going to be a very crude measurement of how well a university is doing its teaching. The process of assessing research quality at universities, as the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, has said, is detailed, analytical, nuanced and looks in a very serious way at the quality of research that a university does. The teaching excellence metrics that are proposed are totally different and they are crude.

Thirdly, there will be an inevitable crudity of perception about the ratings given. The noble and learned Baroness gave a very clear example of this. I use a very obvious analogy: the curse of star ratings in theatre reviews. When we look at the top of the theatre review, we look at whether it has one star, two stars, three stars, four stars or five stars and that is, in most cases, all we look at. We do not then look down and read the analysis of how good the play really was. Exactly the same is going to happen with universities. Are they gold, silver or bronze? If they are bronze, we are not going to look at them. This is, to my mind, an impossibly crude way of assessing, as we ought to assess, genuinely, what quality of teaching is being offered by our universities. I really urge the Government to think again about this imposition of ratings, which will have a perverse effect.