Higher Education and Research Bill

Lord Giddens Excerpts

2nd reading (Hansard): House of Lords
Tuesday 6th December 2016 Lords Chamber

[Lord Giddens (Lab)]

My Lords, I declare interests as a former head of the London School of Economics, a professor at the University of Cambridge and a professor at the University of California, the last of these being relevant to some of the things I want to say. Apropos what the noble Lord, Lord Sutherland, said, I once had the whole UCLA basketball team in my class. They were all about seven feet, six inches tall and they came in and demanded that they all got “A”s. Who was I to quarrel with that?

Speaking as someone who has worked in a variety of universities here and abroad, I believe this Bill to be deeply flawed. It embraces sweeping privatisation at a time when such an approach has become widely discredited. Direct state support for universities is being cut to a minimum. So far as I can trace, it will be at the lowest level of any country in the industrialised world.

The United States is a global leader in higher education—the global leader, I think. I presume that, in preparing their proposals, the Government have sought to learn from the American experience. If so, they have drawn quite the wrong conclusions. I hope that I will get my own little gold medal if, in true didactic fashion, I make three points about universities in the US.

First, many of the for-profit institutions in that country are in deep trouble—indeed, the experiment there has become something of a disaster area. We should learn from what went wrong rather than plunging in willy-nilly as the Government propose. Greater regulation of new entrants than is contained in the Bill is essential.

Secondly, in the US, public universities retain a fundamental presence in higher education and some are at the very top—the aforementioned University of California is perhaps the leading example. By contrast, in the UK, or at least England and Wales, the very notion of higher education as a public good is being undermined, as other speakers have said. This Bill pushes that process much further.

Thirdly, private universities in America have a long history of philanthropy and many have large endowments. The resources thus accumulated protect against external changes and shocks, as well as generating proactive investment. There is nothing comparable in this country, because fundraising is a much more recent endeavour. Universities in this country are far more vulnerable to the vagaries of the marketplace. The time bomb of student debt is likely to be even more devastating here than it already is in the United States.

If the Bill were simply a full-out embrace of market principles, it would at least have the virtue of consistency. It is actually a bizarre mixture of open markets and arcane bureaucracy—110 pages of rules and regulations. Cumbersome bureaucratic language is everywhere. Why “higher education providers” rather than “colleges and universities”? Are graduates supposed to ask each other, “What higher education provider did you go to and pay £50,000 for the privilege?”? At the same time, again as other speakers have said, the Bill introduces direct state control over aspects of university life where institutions have to be autonomous, touching especially on key principles of academic freedom.

The Government declare that they will allow “higher education providers” to fail. As a consequence of the reforms of the past few years, which will now be pushed much further, some top universities are highly leveraged and hence distinctly vulnerable. Would the Government stand idly by if, let us say, a member of the Russell group collapsed? I want a straightforward yes or no answer to that question from the Minister. It is a crucial one as otherwise basic questions of moral hazard arise.

Everyone can agree that teaching quality in universities should be constantly upgraded and improved. Students should have more say in how universities are run, but how will the Government respond to the real concerns universities and student bodies have about the Bill’s proposals? The TEF gives the state powers it never had before in what is nominally supposed to be a free market. Standardised metrics for teaching assessment simply will not work across the whole range of universities. Noble Lords must force the Government to think again on this issue. It is quite wrong to link the capacity to raise tuition fees to such a system. What will work in certain kinds of university simply will not work in others. This is much too crude a scheme.

The Bill has not even caught up with the political stance of the very Government introducing it. An industrial strategy has been mentioned by the Minister, but I do not see where it is in the Bill. Where is the forward planning? Where is the regional policy, since universities everywhere have a civic role in their regions and localities?

Then there is Brexit—something that as yet has no content and will not do so for many months, perhaps years. I cannot emphasise too much that universities face huge uncertainties over this period and must do a great deal of proactive work to cope with them. Why compound these uncertainties by proceeding with the Bill at such a juncture? Minister Jo Johnson is standing by the Bar and will nod if this is correct, but he apparently said that the Bill will provide a life raft while negotiations with the rest of the EU are going on. Life rafts tend to sink when confronted with rough seas.

Higher Education and Research Bill

Lord Giddens Excerpts

Committee: 1st sitting (Hansard): House of Lords
Monday 9th January 2017 Lords Chamber

[Lord Giddens (Lab)]

My Lords, as a former director of the London School of Economics, I think it is perhaps appropriate for me to speak next. I have to say that I do not wholly disagree with all of what the noble Lord, Lord Myners, said. I disagree on the fundamental point of principle, but the criticism he offered was entirely appropriate. In contrast to him, I strongly support this amendment. In the Second Reading debate, I was highly critical of aspects of this Bill. My objections were not motivated by some sort of stick-in-the-mud desire to resist change and innovation. On the contrary, in some ways the Bill is, in my eyes, too conservative—with a little ‘c’, of course.

I accept and endorse the need for an overall legislative framework for higher education. We need to clear up inconsistencies and ambiguities in the existing system and, far more importantly, embrace the deep transformations beginning to affect both teaching and research. At the same time, however, as other speakers have rightly said, we must be careful not to undermine the very qualities that have propelled higher education in this country to the very top globally.

In amending the Bill—and there is no doubt in my mind that substantial emendation is necessary—we must ensure that we avoid the huge problems created in the US around deregulated for-profit institutions. They have a place but they are not the future. As in almost every other sphere, higher education is likely to be transformed in a radical way by the digital revolution—and, in my view, in very short order. This is a revolution of unparalleled pace and scope. Much more potent models for exploring what is to come include edX, linked to Harvard and MIT, and Udacity, which had its origins at Stamford. We should be investing in analogues, and some of that has to be public investment.

As the amendment makes clear, a university is not just a knowledge provider but an active creator of knowledge and ideas—even the noble Lord, Lord Myners, stressed that point. That relates to what teachers do, because research and teaching are part and parcel of a combined enterprise in a university. Disciplined research and the active protection of academic freedom are crucial to this task. In my eyes, it would be a major step forward to have these principles spelled out in binding fashion, as this amendment does. The amendment, in fact, looks to have a great deal of support across the House, and I hope that it will not be treated in partisan terms. Perhaps the Minister will be moved to accept it without driving the matter to a vote. Many other pieces of what could turn out to be a very difficult jigsaw puzzle for the Government would fall into place were he to do so.

[Lord Waldegrave of North Hill (Con)]

My Lords, I declared my interest at Second Reading. I am the most junior member of the club of chancellors mentioned by the noble Lord, Lord Myners, as the newly appointed chancellor of the University of Reading. I have a number of concerns about the Bill and without making a Second Reading speech again, I shall look to the Government to strengthen protections against interference with autonomy.

These are not theoretical objections. In this House, we are all in danger of falling into our anecdotage, but I will give just one. I was once the holder of a similar office to the Minister who is so courteously handling this Bill. My Secretary of State was my late friend and former colleague Sir Keith Joseph. The Secretary of State became incensed by the economics teaching at the Open University, so his junior Ministers, Rhodes Boyson and myself, were given the books to read. This had rather extraordinary results. The Open University’s reply to what Sir Keith saw as unfortunate bias in its teaching was made much worse by its defence that there was a book by Mr Peter Walker that in its view provided balance, which did not necessarily help Sir Keith. This was slightly comic and Sir Keith was a man of immense courtesy and deep understanding of the autonomy of the institution, and nothing much further came of it. But in crude hands and in different worlds it could have done. I shall therefore be looking through the course of this Bill to various things that will help us to strengthen autonomy.

My interest in this first clause is whether a definition helps us. Do we need a definition to say what it is we are helping to provide special protection for? I am made a little nervous by my noble friend Lord Willetts’s comments because the reason that things have not been defined in Bills over the years is the danger of a definition excluding things by accident. Very often when we draw a line we find that we have produced a new boundary and that it is better to leave some things a little greyer. In the 19th century, universities probably meant places where there were multiplicities of departments, but we know of very good liberal arts universities in the United States that do not teach science and are perfectly properly described as universities. Other examples were given by my noble friend Lord Willetts.

I am nervous about the clause as it is defined at the moment, but am interested in the Minister’s response. If he can say that he will take it away and think of this problem of definition, I would be happy with that. As drafted, it is not perfect. It would be odd for any small and perhaps specialised university of great distinction in certain areas that the behemoth of the regulator could demand that it was failing because it was not helping overseas markets or something or other, so there is a danger here. I want definitions to be defended. I do not think that we have it quite in this clause, but my support or not for the clause will somewhat depend on the spirit in which the Minister replies and whether he will agree to take this away and work at it to see if something a little more workable can be discovered.

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[Lord Giddens]

Caltech has a range of other departments, including philosophy, history, social sciences and English.

[Lord Bilimoria]

I was stressing that it focuses on technology—that is its strength and why it wins all those Nobel prizes—but I acknowledge what the noble Lord says.

I go back to areas of specialisation and the purpose of universities. The mindset of certain people, including in this country, is, “You should study at university what you can apply in a job thereafter”—that is, a sort of vocational mindset. Our universities are not what that is about. My oldest son is reading theology at Cambridge. I do not think that he is going to become a priest, but if he wants to, that is up to him. I do not think that that will happen—he will probably become a management consultant—but what he will learn in that environment is phenomenal. He gets one-to-one supervisions with world leaders in his subject. Not every university does that or can afford to do it, but he has that ability. I consulted Cambridge on this. It said that it recognises the importance of diversity in research and teaching and that the success of global competitiveness of the UK’s universities relies on the core principles of sustainability, diversity and—here is the crux of it—institutional autonomy. That is what worries so many of us about this Bill and why this proposed new clause, right up-front, is so important. It is the spirit of it that I completely support.

The pro-vice-chancellor for education at Cambridge, Graham Virgo, has spoken about the last part of the amendment, which is about being a critic and conscience of society. To narrow down the definition just to teaching and research will be to miss the opportunity to improve our universities and to miss the point. Professor Virgo pointed by way of example to the New Zealand Education Act 1989, which had five criteria for defining a university. The fifth of those was for an institution to accept a role as a critic and conscience of society. That is so important and it is why the amendment sets right up-front the essence of what universities should strive to be about, so that we do not go down the wrong track in this once-in-many-decades opportunity to improve our already fantastic, best-of-the-best, proud, jewel-in-the-crown universities.

Higher Education and Research Bill

Lord Giddens Excerpts

Committee: 2nd sitting (Hansard): House of Lords
Wednesday 11th January 2017 Lords Chamber

[Lord Rees of Ludlow (CB)]

My Lords, I support these amendments, in particular for the reasons stated by the noble Baroness, Lady Bakewell, regarding mature learners. However, there are of course many other reasons to expect that part-time learning will be a larger part of the higher education system in future. One other reason is distance learning—so-called MOOCs, and so on—which will have an important role in vocational training, as they stand alone and can be done well by mature, motivated students. However, I also emphasise that part-time learning is essential if you want to have greater open opportunity.

One of the bad features of present higher education is that if someone has been unlucky in their early education, having gone to a poor sixth form or having had family problems, they will not get over the bar at age 18 for admission to a strong university and a strong course. In the present system they do not have a very good second chance. It needs to be made easier for them to do part-time learning—at the Open University and so on—and to gain credits, so that they can qualify for admission to a university on the basis of credits accumulated perhaps elsewhere.

This is something we can learn from the University of California system, in which only a proportion of those who are at Berkeley come straight from high school. Many come through junior college or part-time learning. We need to open up and make things more flexible, which is just another of the ways in which part-time learning will be of growing importance. That is why it is crucial that it should not be in any sense regarded as an afterthought tacked on to the main part of the Bill, and why it is welcome that these amendments will increase the prominence and the dimensions of part-time and lifelong learning in this clause.

[Lord Giddens (Lab)]

My Lords, I support these amendments and will elaborate on what I said at Second Reading about the likely impact of the digital revolution on higher education, which will potentially be absolutely fundamental and possibly as great as it has been in any other area of society and the economy.

Traditionally, part-time and distance learning have been seen as a kind of adjunct to “proper” university education, which is full-time and campus-based. That separation is likely to break down more and more radically, and in the near future rather than the distant one. Indeed, the whole structure of higher education could become fundamentally transformed. Somebody must track these trends and try to work out their implications.

In the US, 4 million undergraduates in 2016 took at least one course online—one-quarter of the total undergraduate body, and that is expected to grow to one-half within the next five years. It has been said—Americans have a way with words—that this has produced “bricks for the rich and clicks for the poor”. However, if that division is a fundamental one, it is rapidly dissolving, as digital learning increasingly becomes part of the day-to-day experience in the top-level universities.

Something huge is going on here; it is “don’t know” territory, but it will be radical. Can the Minister say how, in this Bill, the Government propose to track these trends and work out their implications for students, many of whom pay £50,000 for an experience which may become to some extent obsolete? We do not know how far the campus-based university will survive, but it will be radically transformed.

[Baroness Blackstone (Lab)]

My Lords, I associate myself with these amendments and support what has been said so far. I particularly support what my noble friend Lord Blunkett said—I worked with him as a Minister in the Department for Education and Employment, as it then was—and what my noble friend Lady Bakewell said. I was the master of Birkbeck for nearly a decade, and from that experience I will say something about mature students who study part-time. These people give up a huge amount of their leisure time; they sacrifice all that to work and study at the same time. Incidentally, Birkbeck is coming up to its 200th anniversary. It was set up as a working men’s institute for men who worked by day and studied by night. It has continued in that way, but adding women in the 1830s.

We have to get away from the notion that university and higher education is primarily about full-time study. There may be a somewhat higher proportion of students studying full time. But, as my noble friend Lord Giddens has just said, things are changing and we are going to see far more part-time students in the coming years, partly because some students will not want to take on the enormous debt involved today in undertaking an undergraduate programme but also because the changes in the wider environment will require them to return to part-time higher education to improve their knowledge and update their skills. Only if they do that will they be able to truly contribute to the knowledge economy.

My noble friend Lord Winston referred to part-time students being between the ages of 30 and 60. I did a little preparation before I went to Birkbeck. I went to the University of Toronto—the Canadian university that specialises in part-time and mature students—and was told that the oldest student there was 92. I asked whether I could meet her. They said they were terribly sorry but she was travelling in Europe—so I did not get that opportunity. So I say to noble Lords, “It’s never too late, so think about it”.

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[Lord Willetts]

It is certainly the case that mainstreaming can be a euphemism for a solitary and nasty death, delivered invisibly. A lot of programmes get mainstreamed and it is a euphemism for their disappearance. My view is that when the Office for Students has the kind of ambitious responsibilities for the student experience envisaged in the Bill, it is reasonable to expect participation—in the sense that it is used in these clauses —to be a responsibility for the OfS as a whole. I would argue that that is a better way of ensuring that the noble Baroness’s concerns are met than narrowing it down to one specific function within one part of OfS.

[Lord Giddens]

My Lords, I am afraid that my comments on fair access reflect my general worries about the Bill, which in some respects seems like a dinosaur that has lumbered into the room. It seems to have no relationship structured into it in relation to the tremendous changes that we face in this disruptive period, which are bound to invade education and will crucially affect social mobility.

Fair participation is about social mobility. If the Committee will forgive me being a bit didactic, almost all mobility in the 20th century was what sociologists call absolute mobility. It was made possible by the decline of manual work and the creation of white-collar and professional jobs. As my noble friend Lord Winston mentioned, we have to take really seriously the possibility that this process will actually go into reverse for the next generation, and potentially in a relatively short time, as supercomputers, robotics and other aspects of the transformation of labour markets invade professions. What happened to manual work in a previous generation is almost certain to happen to large segments of professional work over the next 15 to 20 years.

This means that the so-called graduate premium, on the basis of which younger people are encouraged to amass huge levels of debt, reflects the market conditions of two or three decades ago. Somebody must think about the crunches ahead in the relationship between education, social mobility and massive technological innovation. Will that be one of those two offices, and how will it set about it? Why is there not more emphasis on planning in relation to the trends and transformations that we as an economy and a society face?

[Baroness Warwick of Undercliffe (Lab)]

My Lords, I hope that we are not going to lose the main point made by the noble Baroness, Lady Brinton. In light of the comments of the noble Lord, Lord Willetts, I refer back to what the Minister, Jo Johnson, said to the Public Bill Committee about delegation by the OfS to the Director for Fair Access and Participation. He said:

“We envisage that in practice that will mean that the other OfS members will agree a broad remit with the future director for fair access and participation and that the DFAP will report back to them on those activities. As such, the DFAP would have responsibility for those important access and participation activities, including—critically—agreeing the access and participation plan on a day-to-day basis with higher education institutions”.—[Official Report, Commons, Higher Education and Research Bill Committee, 8/9/16; col. 136.]

That seems to me to deal effectively with both those points, although I would welcome the Minister confirming that.

But in looking at that, I do not want us to lose sight of the practicalities of the negotiating position on the ground. There have been two very distinguished directors of OFFA—Sir Martin Harris and the current, excellent director, Les Ebdon—and the current director has made it very clear that having the independence to engage in negotiations free from conflicts of interest has been crucial in securing high levels of commitment by institutions to date and a key factor in OFFA’s success. We need to capture that particular element of the role, and I hope that when the Minister replies he can reassure us that the amendments he has down will accede to and confirm that point, so that this will be very clear to the rest of the Committee.

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[Viscount Younger of Leckie]

My Lords, before I address this group of amendments, I wish to respond to the opening remarks of the noble Lord, Lord Stevenson, to whom I listened carefully. We have worked well together in the dim and distant past on one or two major Bills. I echo his thoughts in saying that that worked well. I hope that we will continue to work well together during the passage of this Bill. However, I remind him that this is only day 2 in Committee. I also remind him and the Committee that my aim at this stage of the Bill—I hope that I have expressed this—is to listen very closely and carefully to all the views expressed and to reflect on them. I hope the Committee will take the general spirit of what I am saying in the right way, to the extent that I have already written some letters of clarification following Monday’s debate, which have already been passed to noble Lords. I hope that we can continue in that spirit. I hope that reassures the noble Lord that the Government are taking seriously the points that have been raised. I address the amendments in this group in that spirit of listening.

I am grateful for this opportunity to discuss the vital role of the new Director for Fair Access and Participation, and, importantly, how he will operate within the Office for Students. I share noble Lords’ desire to ensure that this role is appropriately defined in legislation, given the fundamental importance of improving widening access and participation in higher education. I pick up an interesting point that the noble Baroness, Lady Brinton, raised about access statistics. It is interesting to note that the proportion of young people from disadvantaged backgrounds going into higher education is up from 13.6% in 2009-10 to 19.5% this year, which is a record high. In our latest guidance to the Director of Fair Access dated February last year, we acknowledge that selective institutions, including Oxbridge and the Russell group, already do much to widen access. However, we are convinced that more could, and should, be done, and have asked the Director of Fair Access to push hard to see that more progress is made.

While it has always been our clear intention that the OfS would give responsibility for activities in this area to the Director for Fair Access and Participation, we listened to persuasive arguments that this should be set out more clearly in legislation. We have now tabled a number of amendments to make this clearer on the face of the Bill. To confirm the point made by my noble and learned friend Lord Mackay, these government amendments seek to clarify that the director will be responsible for overseeing the OfS’s performance on access and participation and reporting on that performance to the OfS board. In other words, it is the role of the DFAP to ensure that these obligations are met. In addition, our amendments confirm that the director is responsible for performing the access and participation functions, plus any other functions which are formally delegated by the OfS. Amendment 16 makes it clear that the director will report to the OfS board on performance in this vital area.

In addition, we are ensuring that the legislation makes it clear that if, for any reason, the OfS does not delegate the access and participation functions, it must set out in its annual report both the reasons why and the length of time that these functions were not delegated. This signifies that we envisage this function not being delegated to the DFAP to be very much the exception and not the rule.

My noble friend Lord Willetts mentioned Professor Les Ebdon, the current Director of Fair Access, who has welcomed these amendments, saying:

“These changes will be crucial in helping the Government to find a high calibre Director for Fair Access and Participation, who can challenge universities and colleges to make further, faster progress towards their targets, while acting as a high profile champion for fair access issues”.

The noble Baroness, Lady Brinton, made the point that the director must be a senior person with a high profile in the sector and a senior level of respect and credibility, and she is right. We will launch a recruitment process for the director shortly. We agree that it must indeed be a senior figure who commands respect in the sector. I also assure noble Lords that there are arrangements to call providers to account where they are considered to be failing to meet their access and participation plans. Sanctions include the power for the OfS to refuse to renew an access and participation plan, to impose monetary penalties and, in extreme cases, to suspend or deregister providers.

The noble Baronesses, Lady Brinton and Lady Blackstone, raised issues about the DFAP’s reporting requirements. I reassure the Committee that the work of the DFAP will not be separate from the work of the OfS, so its work will be reported to Parliament as part of the OfS’s overall accountability requirements. It would not be consistent with integrating the role into the OfS to require separate reporting from a single member of the OfS when the organisation would be governed collectively by all members. Clause 36 allows the Secretary of State to direct the Office for Students to provide reports on issues relating to equality of opportunity in access and participation.

I listened carefully to the interesting remarks of the noble Earl, Lord Listowel, about bright pupils from low-income backgrounds who may become great scientists. I am happy to write to him on that, and we also agree that this is an important issue.

The noble Baroness, Lady Quin, asked what advice the Government are taking from providers that have a good record on access and participation. Again, I reassure her that the Green Paper that preceded the Bill received over 600 responses, including from institutions with good track records on access and participation. This has been supplemented with follow-up meetings, and ongoing engagement with the sector directly and through HEFCE and OFFA.

The noble Earl, Lord Listowel, asked what we would do to support care leavers to enter higher education—again, another good point. Care leavers are a target group in the Director of Fair Access’s guidance to universities in writing their access agreements. Support for care leavers and access agreements has grown considerably over the years, and around 80% of access agreements include specific action to support care leavers.

The noble Baroness, Lady Blackstone, asked about a student’s progression both during and after their time at university. It is right that the access and participation statements cover the whole student life cycle for students from disadvantaged backgrounds; that is our intention in extending the coverage of access and participation plans from just access. Access is meaningful only if entrants go on to complete their studies—which is rather obvious—and progress to a good job or to further study.

With those responses in mind, I therefore ask the noble Lord to withdraw Amendment 14, and I will move the government amendments.

[Lord Giddens]

Will anybody be responsible for monitoring wider trends in labour markets in the context of higher education and integrating that with issues of access? If you do not do that, access is relatively meaningless. You cannot simply leave it to the Treasury. Which office will do that? Where is the forward planning in all this?

[Viscount Younger of Leckie]

I understand that the Director for Fair Access and Participation will have the right to find these statistics, which will assist him in his role. I cannot envisage a situation where he would not wish to be aware of the bigger picture to carry out his role effectively.