Higher Education

Baroness Morris of Yardley Excerpts

Wednesday 9th April 2014 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Morris of Yardley (Lab)]

My Lords, I thank the Minister for bringing this debate to the House. There is a great deal of expertise across the Chamber and, given the breadth of the title of the debate, I am sure that we will explore a wide range of issues.

I start on a conciliatory note by joining the Minister in acknowledging the importance of this sector. Wherever you look in life, at whichever quarter of our society—whether it is our industry or competitiveness or whatever —universities play an important role. Certainly, as we become a greater globalised economy and its success depends on research and innovation, universities will have a greater role in what we do, not a lesser role.

We should take this opportunity to recognise some considerable successes. Sometimes we are not good at repeating what our successes are and I want to do that. In any league table, we regularly have a small number of universities in the international top 10. We should be very proud of that and the fact that we punch above our weight. We have excellent research. In terms of the proportion of publications compared to the size of the nation and the amount of our investment, we punch above our weight. Higher education gives us a strong export industry, with £10.7 billion of export earnings. Many of our international partnerships have been built on personal relationships which started when people from overseas came here to study. For many of us who are of that first generation of socially mobile people, we owe that to higher education.

There is a good news story to be told about higher education and the Minister endeavoured to tell it, but it is not quite as rosy as he would have us believe. I was waiting for the next 15 minutes of his speech, when he could have addressed some of the real problems affecting the higher education sector at the moment. There are considerable challenges and, although our research is good, our spending on research has dropped. It is now at a lower percentage than other OECD nations. The number of part-time students has fallen by more than 30% and, whatever the increase in the number of people going into higher education, we all know that social class plays too high a part in access to and attendance at university. As we have increased the numbers of people going to university, we have never narrowed the gap between the percentages of children from higher and lower socioeconomic backgrounds who go to university.

We also pay too little attention to the difference that is fast emerging between the percentage of males and the percentage of females, particularly school leavers, who attend higher education. Some 74% of males do not go into higher education, which is quite a frightening figure. The number of males applying for higher education is now lower than the number of women who attend. That is another characteristic which reflects the fact that we have not yet solved the problems of access.

What we did not hear about from the Minister, of course, is the fact that the new student funding system could actually end up being more expensive than the system it replaced. The only reason I draw attention to this is because universities are so important that any decline or structural difficulties need to be addressed, so I regret the fact that the Minister did not refer to those in his speech.

However, I want to address a completely different point. If we were having a debate about schools, we would be talking about how to create a diverse system. The word “diversity” has been at the top of the education agenda of both parties for two or three decades. We have had and still have a diverse system in higher education in many ways, but we seek to hide it, which is almost the opposite of what happens in schools. Let us reflect on the situation two or three decades ago before higher education was brought together into one structure. Its diverse missions were evident in its titles. We had the polytechnics, the institutes of technology, the colleges of education which had replaced the teacher training colleges, and we had very focused colleges of further education.

Without wanting to feel that I am getting really old by thinking that all the glory is in the past, there is a part of me that yearns for what was the situation when I was the head of the sixth form at an inner-city comprehensive school. For those students who wanted to take a vocational route into a vocational profession, the path was very clear, and it went something like this. They would go to college to do a BTEC, then on to a polytechnic to do an HND, and then they would convert it into a degree. There was a clarity of mission and of route that has somehow become muddied and hidden in the situation we have now. Although I do not want to argue the case for going back, and although I appreciate the benefits which the unified system has brought, I worry that what is happening in actual fact is that we will never get away from groupings. We have groupings within the unified higher education system today, but they do not give clarity about mission or send a message about a clear route through. What we have is self-styled and self-described university groupings which have resegmented the higher education system without giving it the clarity it used to have.

Let us look at my own career since I became a Member of your Lordships’ House. For three years I worked at the University of Sunderland. At the moment I am chair of the council at Goldsmiths and I am employed by the University of York; in saying this I have declared my interests as set out in the register. Over the years I have worked at a post-1992 university, I chair the council at what was a 1994 university—I know that the 1994 group has been abolished, but I am sure that something will take its place—and I work at a Russell group university. Those are the groupings that have replaced the titles we used to have. When I look at the three universities with which I have connections, I can see that every one of them excels at part of its mission. Sunderland University does the best of any institution I know of at civic leadership. Sunderland city would not have made the progress it has as a city in the north-east if it did not have its university with its widening participation, which is taken seriously. That is helping social mobility in one of the most deprived areas of the country. Goldsmiths regularly produces some of our nation’s finest artists and musicians and it is a university with an international record. York has an excellent reputation for research and regularly appears in the top 10 or 15 of any university league table. But although all three universities have an area of excellence, the perception of the groupings they are placed in defines them as institutions, and that risks hiding their strengths.

Whatever is the strength of a university or however much it might treasure that strength, it is the performance tables which actually define them. Two of the universities I have been connected with are penalised for their strengths. Sunderland University excels at widening participation but is penalised because one of the big ratings in the university league tables is the entry qualifications of the students it admits. Because it takes risks with children from poor backgrounds and second-time learners, and puts its reputation on the line, it is penalised in the rankings, despite its student satisfaction being well above 4. As for Goldsmiths, because it excels in art and music but does not do any STEM subjects, it is penalised by losing all its teaching grant.

The issue I want to raise today is that the shorthand for excellence has become self-defined by the sector and risks hiding much of the excellence that we actually have. I am really worried that we are in a situation now where not getting into what is defined as a top university is seen as a failure and those universities that are not considered a top university are not seen as contributing to the nation in the way that they have. However, in truth, the higher education system is more complex than that. Only 12 universities have more than half of their courses in the top 10. Let us just think about that: if you go to the University of Kent to study law, to Aberystwyth to study librarianship and information technology, to Manchester Metropolitan to study nursing, to Aston in Birmingham to study pharmacy or to the University of the West of England to study engineering, you have made the decision to go to a top 10 university for your course. However, not one of those universities has an overall ranking within the top 25, and some of them have an overall ranking outside the top 70. That matters, not because I want to pretend all universities are as good as each other or are all the same but because I want the opposite. The challenge I am putting out is that there should be greater rigour in defining excellence and it should not be just at university level.

The truth is that the self-styled university groupings have become shorthand for judging the best graduates, and it is that link that matters. Although the information is there on the website about strength in courses, employers and the wider world look to people who have gone to what is considered to be a top university and make the assumption that they are a top graduate. However, in many cases, that will not be the case. Perhaps the Minister will reflect on that and come back at the end of the debate to say how we can ensure that we have a higher education system that recognises, funds and assesses the hugely diverse nature of our higher education sector and that really does as much as it can to allow the sector’s many strengths to flourish and grow. Only in that way, and not by narrowing what we mean by a good university, will we be able to make sure that universities continue to play the important role that they have done since they came to our country.