Higher Education and Research Bill (Seventh sitting)

Jo Churchill Excerpts

Committee Debate: 7th Sitting: House of Commons
Thursday 15th September 2016 Public Bill Committees

[Gordon Marsden]

My hon. Friend, indefatigable as ever, makes an excellent point. I will not dwell on the issue to which she refers. It was part of the substance of the Prime Minister’s speech, and a lot of it was in the statement made by the Secretary of State for Education the other day, so I will not go into any detail on it other than to observe that my hon. Friend is absolutely right: if universities are to take on a significant, major role—there can be lots of discussions about how that is done, the value of it and all the rest—inevitably that is another element that will call upon their resources.

[Jo Churchill (Bury St Edmunds) (Con)]

I would like to try to understand where the Labour party is on this matter. If we are not allowed to build in for inflation, what do we do? For example, I believe fees have now dropped back to £8,500 in real terms. We are merely building in inflation proofing, so that universities can think about how they invest in relation to the teaching excellence framework and invest for students by delivering courses of quality. What do we hear from the Opposition? At the general election, the then Leader of the Opposition was talking about taking fees down to £6,000, and I think that the latest policy is for university education to be free. We have to pay for excellence and quality.

[Gordon Marsden]

I thank the hon. Lady for her extremely eloquent intervention. Perhaps it will set a trend for Government Members to speak on some of these very important clauses. I am sure that their constituents would like to know that the hours that they spend in the Committee Room, which inevitably are taken from other things, are rewarded by their saying something about the Bill. So far, we have not heard much from them.

The hon. Lady’s intervention enables me to make two points. First, I remind her gently that she is a Member of the Government party, and it is the Government who are advancing these proposals. It is not a question of what the Labour party may or may not have promised.

Higher Education and Research Bill (Third sitting)

Jo Churchill Excerpts

Committee Debate: 3rd sitting: House of Commons
Thursday 8th September 2016 Public Bill Committees

[Carol Monaghan]

Q Professor Nelson, since you are talking about people looking for grants and getting funding from different organisations, potentially somebody looking for a grant here could be getting all of their money from the one institution—from UKRI—because they will be going to a research council, the funding council and Innovate UK. Is there a problem that everything could be coming from the one body?

Professor Philip Nelson: I do not see that. The roots will still be distinct. For example, when it comes to the dual support system, it is clearly being protected—in fact, enshrined in legislation for the first time. It is clear that the QR money as it is called—the quality-related money—that currently comes from the Higher Education Funding Council for England is still going to be delivered via Research England. That is a clearly separated and different funding stream from the research council funding stream. I do not think there are any intrinsic difficulties because the Bill deals with that clear separation.

Dr Ruth McKernan: With Innovate UK grant funding, it is all matched funding. Businesses or private investors have to put in an equal amount and there are regulations that surround how businesses get their funding—state aid rules. One reason we are keen to use more financial tools is to ensure that we use public money to the extent that it is useful but also encourage private investment. With our business-facing mind we need to ensure that we use private investment as much and do not expect people to rely wholly on UKRI for funding.

Professor Ottoline Leyser: I would say that basically it is all taxpayers’ money, apart from the stuff that comes in through business; if we think of it in those terms.

[Jo Churchill (Bury St Edmunds) (Con)]

Q Looking at that connection between business and research and charities, which is of particular interest to me, and building on the opportunities that we have got there, would you welcome the protection of the dual support in the Bill, helping to provide long-term confidence to both universities and charities in order to drive some of that innovative work forward?

Professor Philip Nelson: I would certainly welcome it, as I said in my opening remarks. Dual support was absolutely key to us in terms of sustaining the effective system that we have, mainly because the QR money—the HEFCE money—takes that sort of retrospective view of performance, whereas research councils are looking prospectively at what might be achieved. So I think it is critical that that balanced funding, as it is called in the Bill, is properly maintained and retained.

Professor Ottoline Leyser: Absolutely. Dual support is a key strength of the UK Research and Innovation system, and not just because of the charities. We are really excited that it is now going to be in law.

[Dr Blackman-Woods]

Q As you know, the Nurse review proposed establishing a ministerial committee to enable joined-up, cross-Government discussion of strategic priorities for research and funding. The Government rejected that in favour of reforming the Prime Minister’s Council for Science and Technology. Do you think that council can be reformed to deliver what Sir Paul Nurse envisaged?

Professor Philip Nelson: I think it can be.

--- Later in debate ---

[Mr Marsden]

Okay. On the issue of alternative providers, the QAA’s most recent survey shows that shortcomings were uncovered in a third. Are the proposals for registering alternative providers adequate? That is obviously a point that Sorana might want to comment on. The other point is about the process on the creation of the OFS. The complicated architecture between QAA, HEFCE and all the rest of it will take up to two or three years. Are either of you alarmed that that will create problems for the UK brand abroad?

Douglas Blackstock: Starting with the current arrangements, I think that they have been proved. We have made significant steps through the introduction, in our activities, of financial sustainability checks, and HEFCE has been doing that as well. The creation of the register will strengthen it too. It is a sign of the system’s success that the providers that are doing well have come out well. We have now had the first alternative providers that have commended judgments and are doing well, but where there have been shortcomings, they have been exposed in public reporting.

In the five years we have come through since we took on the review of alternative providers, the market has reduced in terms of the number of providers, but the stronger ones have survived and are doing better in reviews. We recently published an analysis of our reviews of alternative providers, and those that have a partnership with a university do well. They come out well, because they have a mature relationship.

Sorana Vieru: I am alarmed by the fact that these are risky reforms that are being pursued at risky times, and I cannot see where student representation sits. With the split of knowledge exchange—with it coming out of HEFCE and going into UKRI—do postgraduate research students fall through the cracks? I would like to see more clarity about where those functions are. We are creating an office for students without having student representation designated on the board or the quality assessment committee, or any statutory duty placed on that office to work with and consult students to represent their interests.

[Jo Churchill]

Q Mr Blackstock, you have said that you welcome the single register, financial stability and so on, but you are the quality body for higher education, so do you believe that the necessary quality safeguards are in place to do that intelligent monitoring that you spoke about and to ensure that there is quality for all students of any age at any institution?

Douglas Blackstock: We are in the process of reform anyway, and there has been a detailed consultation and a move towards this risk-based system, which involves an annual provider review. There is much more regular checking up on how institutions are performing, and then a series of triggers to investigate where there are problems. That is all strong and good, and I welcome it. My one residual concern was put rather nicely to me recently by a vice-chancellor of a prestigious university: “If we never look at the best, how will we know what good looks like?” That is my one concern—that we need to work with the system on an enhancement approach that would help improve quality, perhaps learning the lessons from the quality enhancement framework that we operate in partnership with others in Scotland.

[Dr Blackman-Woods]

Q On that point, do you think the teaching excellence framework will raise teaching standards, or will it simply lead to a very complicated fee system in which we will get different levels of fees across courses and institutions over time and they will change constantly?

Douglas Blackstock: I think the teaching excellence framework has real potential to raise teaching standards in UK HE.

Sorana Vieru: I do not think it is a secret that we do not think the metrics in the teaching excellence framework are robust enough. We welcome a focus on teaching quality and a way to improve that, but given the way the teaching excellence framework has been proposed, it is not likely to achieve that, due to the metrics not actually matching teaching excellence.

Higher Education and Research Bill (Fourth sitting)

Jo Churchill Excerpts

Committee Debate: 4th sitting: House of Commons
Thursday 8th September 2016 Public Bill Committees

[Mr Marsden]

In the Minister’s concluding remarks on the previous group, he referred to the important role of the director for fair access and participation. In the amendments we are proposing now—I see that my hon. Friend the Member for Ilford North has tabled other amendments in this regard, too—we want to explore the independence and flexibility of the director with the Minister. He rightly described that in his comments as part and parcel of what the Government want to embody in the Bill.

I am not being particularly critical, but, as always, we did not have a great deal of time to tease out some of the implications for the director—whoever holds that office—when the current director of fair access appeared in the evidence session. We could take enough from what he said to know that the ability of the director for fair access and participation to negotiate with institutions—whether soft-baked, hard-baked or anyway-you-want-baked—would be seriously compromised if the director did not have the ultimate authority to approve or refuse access and participation plans. My hon. Friends who have tabled amendments and I believe that that is not sufficiently clear in the Bill, so we want to pursue the matter further with the Minister.

To ensure that the targets set by universities and colleges are sufficiently challenging will always involve tough negotiations. For the director to have had that independence to engage in negotiation free from conflicts of interest has been crucial in securing high levels of commitment by institutions to date—the key factor in OFFA’s success, which vindicates the decision of the Minister’s predecessor, David Willetts, to appoint Les Ebdon to the post in the first place. Negotiations can secure significant additional investment in access and a marked increase in the ambition of many universities and colleges. For example, in the 2016-17 access agreements the director’s negotiations led to improved targets at 94 institutions, and 28 increased their level of predicted spend, which secured an additional £11.4 million for fair access and participation.

Those are the statistics, and statistics are important. After all, we often talk about evidence-driven policy, and it is gratifying when there is evidence to drive the policy. It also, incidentally, strengthens the Minister’s hand in the financial discussions that he has to have from time to time with the Treasury. Behind the figures, however, lies the success story, or aspirational stories, of hundreds and thousands of not only young people, but—I speak with feeling as a former Open University tutor—older people who traditionally thought that higher education was not for them. In any system, some people will always be able to bustle their way through, even when they have not had opportunities on a previous occasion, but the whole point of a director for fair access and participation is to spread best practice, not only from the best universities and the most determined students, but generally.

I am labouring this point, because it is so important to continued success. When an important new framework is to be established with the office for students, it is crucial that the director’s ability to do his or her job is not impeded, whether by omission or by unexpected and unplanned consequences. If the director for fair access and participation can be bypassed and overruled by the chief executive or board of the office for students, we believe, as do others, that that would significantly undermine his or her ability to negotiate directly with vice-chancellors and to offer a robust challenge. That would probably lead to a significant scaling down of ambition by some institutions. That, I am sure—indeed, I do not need to be sure, because the Minister has waxed eloquent on it in several speeches and lectures at a number of institutions over the past year—is not the Minister’s intention. The amendments are, therefore, genuinely intended to be helpful in getting clarification.

It is vital to have a high-profile director for fair access and participation with the authority and credibility to offer robust challenges to institutions. A director who has first-hand experience of how tension at a higher education provider plays out in practice—in relation to finance, marketing, recruitment, student voice, learning and teaching, and Government policies and initiatives—will be well positioned to make nuanced judgments across access agreement negotiations about what is reasonable and achievable. That would obviously require the director to be a credible champion and a high-profile person in this field.

If the director does not have responsibility over access agreements and that is not clear in primary legislation—putting to one side the helpful advice that Ministers may be able to give subsequently—that will send out the wrong message for the institutions that we would expect to engage in the new settlement resulting from the Bill, and will make much more difficult both the Government’s avowed intent to widen participation and access and the specific responsibility of the director to pursue that.

[Jo Churchill (Bury St Edmunds) (Con)]

I am getting a little lost. Is not the hon. Gentleman being a little managerial now by saying that only the director for fair access and participation is responsible? Based on the arguments he made in favour of previous amendments—that we should be looking at the broader ability of the board to make decisions—should it not be the responsibility of the whole board to feed into such a position in order to ensure that the important area of access and participation really does what it says on the tin?

[Mr Marsden]

I have considerable respect for the hon. Lady, not least on the basis of the speech she made on Second Reading, and she has made a valuable point. It is not my intention, or that of my colleagues, to say that the director for fair access and participation should sit in a great bubble somewhere thinking great thoughts and that the OFS should simply rubber-stamp them at the end of the day. It is about who takes the initiative and carries things through on a day-to-day basis. With the best will in the world, we do not believe that that should be left to the board.

I have served on boards, committees, trusts and all the rest—as have, I am sure, many Committee members from both sides of the House—and everyone knows that one of the most difficult things to get right is the balance between overall strategic policy and the day-to-day administration of that policy. In my view—I have not heard many people dissent from this position—the director of fair access has been a successful innovation. It is important that those elements of the role that have worked so well so far are not restricted, unintentionally—I am not saying there is a dastardly plot to undermine them—by a defective or unclear identification and delegation of the director’s powers in the Bill.

This is a question not of managerialism but of realpolitik. We all know that in the real world and in the political world, if people’s powers are not well defined, there will always be someone who at some point will try to chip away at them. That is the point I am trying to get at. I understand entirely the point that the hon. Member for Bury St Edmunds was making. I do not wish to micromanage the affairs of the office of the director for fair access and participation any more than I think the Minister does, but I do not want to see set in legislation a train of views that takes us down the path I have described.

To meet the Government’s goal of doubling the rate of young people from disadvantaged backgrounds entering higher education by 2020 will require an acceleration of the process and a director who can continue to offer those robust challenges. If the director does not retain the authority to approve or reject an access and participation plan, if it is not clear that he or she retains that authority, or if that power can be delegated to others and decisions overturned, there is a real risk that the director’s position will be seen as weakened. Believe me, having sat on the Education Committee, I do not think that lawyers and judicial reviews or internal rows in Departments, detracting from the work of that Department, are something to be recommended.

Higher Education and Research Bill (First sitting)

Jo Churchill Excerpts

Committee Debate: 1st sitting: House of Commons
Tuesday 6th September 2016 Public Bill Committees

[The Chair]

Order. I must remind the Committee that five Members have indicated that they wish to ask questions and we have 16 minutes left before I have to call order, so we need brief questions and answers.

[Jo Churchill (Bury St Edmunds) (Con)]

Q Moving to a slightly different area, do you think the reforms in the Bill will help to drive social mobility and widen participation? I am particularly interested in capturing the more mature people in our workforce to ensure skills are kept up throughout a working life.

Professor Quintin McKellar: We would specifically hope that the Bill might include not only elements that drive competition but those that drive collaboration, because we think that collaborative activity can help us with our widening participation. To give one example, black and minority ethnic students have currently got an attainment disadvantage across the sector and we are working together collaboratively across the sector to try to address that. Without that sort of collaboration—if we were simply competing with each other—it is very difficult. Collaboration is hugely important, particularly in regard to social mobility.

Mary Curnock Cook: While the arrangements for making data from UCAS, for example, available to researchers will not change social mobility in itself, it does open up the opportunity to look specifically at different aspects of social mobility.

Professor Sir Leszek Borysiewicz: One potential advantage that we must recognise of the move of some of the education and OFS to the Department for Education is that it may well begin to address the continuum of education and the attainment shortfalls that largely reside within the secondary schools. If that promotes greater interaction between the requirements for entry into higher education and a greater understanding of that within secondary education and more cohesion at that level, that could be a real help towards closing the attainment gap of BME students.

[Paul Blomfield]

Q May I pursue the issue of the regulatory framework a little further? Obviously, this is the first major discussion we have had on this for some time and it is important that we get it right. It is in the context of a Bill that is also seeking to encourage new providers. What thoughts do members of the panel have on how we should get it right and whether there are any ways in which the Bill could be improved in relation to the entry point of the new providers, the overall oversight of the system and the potential for market failure?

Professor Sir Leszek Borysiewicz: This is a difficult issue. I think the provision of diversity in the sector is something that has stood British higher education well. Different institutions have different goals and directions and cater for different needs for higher education within the sector, from mature students at one end, to vocational courses, to those operating in a very academic sphere.

New providers have to be looked at in the context of what is the positive contribution they can make. Two important issues will be the demand from the sector for this new provision and, secondly, the standards under which those institutions are recognised. From my point of view there is a third which is very important: high standards have to be set for the sustainability of new providers in the sector. It is no good an operation starting with an income stream that is predicated on a business plan of recruitment without a sufficient resource to ensure that those entering in year one will be able to complete their studies and end up with a degree that is actually worth something when facing employers. Otherwise, this is something that becomes not helpful and potentially very detrimental to the achievement and attainment of those individual students. That is the one area on which I would like to see rather more stress paid; the sustainability of the provision by a new provider.

Professor Quintin McKellar: We would support the diversity and competition that new providers would bring to the sector. The concern we have is one that has been raised already: that they cherry-pick subjects. In terms of continuing to provide across the board STEM subjects of engineering, mathematics and so on, it is unlikely that the new providers will enter those areas, and that could be a risk for the rest of us.

Sir Alan Langlands: I think the Bill does try to strike the balance between rigour in relation to new entries and streamlining the system a bit. We have to be careful that we are not driven too much in the direction of streamlining without the rigour. The rigour has to be on quality and standards, access and participation, good governance. Linking to Professor Borysiewicz’s point, it is hugely important that financial sustainability is seen alongside academic sustainability. This has got to be a long-term effort, if you are developing a new universe.

Mary Curnock Cook: Briefly, I would like to echo the points about sustainability, because I think it is absolutely catastrophic for students if their provider is forced to exit the market. A lot of higher education is very local. A lot of students go to university within a few miles of where they live, and there are not necessarily other providers where they could continue their studies if their institution fails.

The only other point I would make is about university title. I do not want to start a debate about “What is a university?”, but I think that most people, their parents, advisers, teachers and everyone else involved has a clear idea about what they think a university is. It would be of concern if students were applying to something that they thought was a university in the general understanding of the issue and found that it was something quite different.