Further and Higher Education (Access) Bill

Greg Knight Excerpts

Friday 4th March 2011 Commons Chamber

[Mr Chope]

I am grateful to my hon. Friend. He is obviously demonstrating that he has an open mind on this subject, which is more than I can say for the Government in relation to another Bill that I have on the Order Paper, the Minimum Wage (Amendment) Bill. Yesterday, before he had even had a chance to the listen to the arguments for that Bill, the Leader of the House said that the Government would be against it. I welcome the fact that my hon. Friend has an open mind on this issue.

I am sure that my hon. Friend will agree that there is a lot of confusion at the moment, among universities in particular and other institutions of higher education, because the Government seem to be at sixes and sevens in developing their policy in this area. Originally, the Government said that they would publish guidance to the Office for Fair Access by the end of January to enable it to give guidance to universities by the middle of February on their admissions policies for the academic year starting in 2012. Despite full guidance having been issued in the middle of February, with the Minister for Universities and Science saying in a press statement at the time that OFFA would be able to advise universities by the end of February, as of now, in the first week of March, there is still no information from OFFA on the principles that universities should apply for next year’s admissions.

[Mr Greg Knight (East Yorkshire) (Con)]

On the subject of guidance, may I ask why my hon. Friend has, unusually, not published explanatory notes and guidance to his Bill?

[Mr Chope]

I am grateful to my right hon. Friend for that question. The reason is that I thought that my Bill was exemplary in putting forward an argument in simple language that everyone should be able to understand, and that it did not need any guidance. I will come to the detail of the Bill shortly. I hope that, having read the Bill, he accepts that it is plain about what it seeks to achieve.

[Mr Knight]

I am grateful to my hon. Friend for giving way again. My point was that if he had issued guidance, the House might not need him to make such a long speech explaining his Bill.

[Mr Chope]

My right hon. Friend has just succeeded in getting his Bill through its Second Reading, Committee stage and Third Reading very fast. I hope that my Bill will make similarly rapid progress. That is why I look forward eagerly to hearing what the Government’s attitude to it will be. As a general rule, I am not sure that the length of the explanatory notes, or the fact that there are explanatory notes, is a good guide to whether a Bill will make progress. If I recall correctly, the Wreck Removal Convention Bill, which was brought forward by my hon. Friend the Member for Suffolk Coastal (Dr Coffey) and which we will discuss in a fortnight, has quite extensive explanatory notes. I am not sure that that is necessarily an indication of how much time will be spent discussing it.

I return now to one of the principal reasons for my concern about the guidance. The full guidance that was issued by the Secretary of State for Business, Innovation and Skills and the Minister for Universities and Science to the director of fair access in February was based on the draft guidance that was issued on 7 December 2010. Paragraph 6.1 of the draft guidance was very clear:

“There have been no changes in the legal constraints on your powers as Director of Fair Access. You are not empowered to interfere in institutions’ decisions about the admissions of students and you may only set conditions that clearly relate to promoting participation and access.”

When the final guidance was issued last month, that paragraph was omitted. I tabled a parliamentary question to the Minister for Universities and Science, asking why it had been omitted. Unfortunately, the fact that I received a holding reply rather than an immediate substantive reply makes it obvious that he had to think about why it had been omitted. Eventually, he came back with an answer pursuant to the holding answer of 16 February:

“Paragraph 6.1 was unnecessary as it provided no new information.”—[Official Report, 17 February 2011; Vol. 523, c. 981W.]

I am not convinced by that and remain very suspicious. Indeed, the full guidance is more extensive than the draft guidance. The full guidance is some seven and a half pages long, whereas the draft was only five and a half pages long. That clearly expressed paragraph is omitted from the final guidance.

I share the concern of many people in universities that the Government are trying to increase regulation and interference to tick boxes on social engineering and social mobility, and that that is ill conceived.

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[Mr Chope]

Certainly, Mr Deputy Speaker. It would ill-behove either you or me to bask in any glory as a result of that by-election result. It is a pity, however, that there is no Liberal Democrat representative in today’s debate to discuss these very important issues.

I turn to the measures being taken already to improve access. There is going to be a measurement system under the proposals for assessing the ability or willingness of OFFA to allow universities to charge higher fees. The system for measuring the success in improving access needs to include—it does not at the moment—access to other institutions as a result of the work carried out by a particular university. The Russell group welcomed

“the Government’s guidance that institutions should set their own targets and measures of progress”,

but was concerned that

“existing…widening participation benchmarks are unsuitable as targets against which institutions’ progress can be meaningfully measured.”

It quotes Lord Browne—the guru on this issue, who produced his report last year—who found that

“the benchmarks do not provide a sophisticated enough picture of the student population actually qualified to meet the entry requirements of many courses. For example, they take no account of the fact that someone with 4 A*s at A-level might have a high tariff score but would not have a strong chance of being accepted on a Medicine course if these A-levels are in the wrong subjects…Moreover, financial penalties for not meeting these targets would be unfair and unhelpful to our aim of investing in ways to help poorer students win a place at our universities.”

[Mr Knight]

We are having a very interesting debate, but underlying it is the question of whether we should support the Bill. I have to say to my hon. Friend, however, that the more I look at his Bill, the less I think of it. I do not see how it can achieve anything, because clause 3 on exemptions blows a hole in clause 1, under which a decision has to be made on the basis of merit alone. Clause 3 states that a course can be advertised where there are

“criteria additional to or in substitution for the criterion of merit”.

To use an extreme example, if this Bill was the only arbiter that universities have to follow, they could advertise a course for aspiring gentlefolk where the only requirement is that someone can pay the high fees.

[Mr Chope]

Exactly, but my right hon. Friend fails to appreciate the transparency of the measure. If an institution of higher or further education is going to give places on a particular course on criteria other than merit, it should make that clear when people are considering applying to that university. For example, if it offers a sports science course, and welcomes in particular people who are proficient at playing soccer, it should say so in the application so that people who cannot kick a ball at all will not apply, or understand that if they do so it is unlikely that they will be accepted. Clause 3 tries to make sure that where universities give places on criteria other than academic merit those criteria are spelt out openly and transparently. I am surprised that my right hon. Friend is concerned about that. Perhaps he will accept that his interpretation of the clause is incorrect.

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[Mr Chope]

I believe that it is pretty transparent, although some academic work has been done that shows that, inevitably, subjectivity is involved in assessing people’s suitability for going to university. There is no way in which someone who has been refused a place at a university can find out the specific reasons for that decision, although it is normally possible for them to obtain informal feedback from the university through their school or college.

I am not suggesting that the current system is completely transparent, which is why it would be better for it to be plain as a pikestaff that admissions should be made on the basis of merit. There is a feeling, borne out in research for Oxford university, that some admissions tutors for that university are inclined to choose pupils who do not come from independent schools, because they believe that independent school pupils have an unfair advantage and they wish to discount that advantage. They do so on the basis of subjective judgments, which very much runs against the principle of transparency. I hope that the Minister will deal with that point. A problem with the speech by my right hon. Friend the Minister for Universities and Science on 17 February was that he misquoted some of the evidence from the Ogg, Zimdars and Heath report for Oxford. He used that evidence to suggest that there was a bias in favour of pupils from private schools, when a proper reading shows quite the reverse, with a bias against pupils from private schools.

With all these issues, the problems that concern me are problems of definition. If we are going to try to categorise schools, whether they are independent or private on the one hand, or state schools on the other, how do we categorise those pupils who move from the independent sector into the state sector in the last two years of their course, or perhaps leave an independent school and go to a tertiary college to resit their exams and apply to university? There are quite a lot of independent schools with pupils who came originally from the state sector, often with bursaries. Will those pupils be penalised when they apply to university—or do the universities accept those pupils?—because their last place of education was an independent school, even though they started off in the most difficult circumstances? Many pupils at independent schools are in receipt of education maintenance allowance, which may surprise the hon. Member for Wrexham (Ian Lucas), and it may cause some people to say that that is another reason why EMA is ill-targeted. However, there are many pupils at independent schools whose backgrounds would be regarded as poor or disadvantaged in the context of the higher education access arrangements that the Government are discussing.

[Mr Knight]

I am afraid that my hon. Friend has not convinced me. It is quite clear that clause 3 is so wide as to blow a hole in clause 1. In response to my earlier intervention, he appears to accept that it would be quite possible, if the Bill were the only arbiter, for a university to decide that it wanted to take unintelligent people with money. It could advertise a course for aspiring gentlefolk when, to use a colloquialism, all that it is interested in is money from rich thickos.

[Mr Chope]

I do not know whether my right hon. Friend has read today’s press reports about the London School of Economics and one of its erstwhile postgraduate students from Libya. I am not sure whether his remarks would apply to that particular happening. If a university chooses to have a closed scholarship arrangement, as some do, there is no reason why that should not continue under the Bill, provided that it is set out transparently. Ultimately—this is why the desire for ever more Government regulation is ill conceived—why can we not trust those universities to do what is best for them in the great marketplace? No self-respecting institution wants a reputation, to use my right hon. Friend’s example, for taking on a lot of thickos who will not perform at university, because that will push the university down the league tables, and will affect its ability to attract research grants and the brightest and the best. The Government cannot second-guess all those decisions—they have to be made by universities or other higher education institutions themselves.