Higher Education and Research Bill
Debate between Rebecca Pow and Gordon MarsdenTuesday 19th July 2016
(7 years, 10 months ago)
Commons ChamberRead Full debate Higher Education and Research Act 2017 View all Higher Education and Research Act 2017 Debates Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
Mr Marsden
I will make progress and come to the hon. Lady presently.
Long-established institutions such as Cambridge University have said quite straightforwardly that they do not support the link between the TEF and fees. Cambridge University states:
“it is bound to affect student decision-making adversely, and in particular it may deter students from low income families from applying to the best universities”.
No wonder the Government’s equality analysis had to resort to newspeak, saying that
“TEF is expected to benefit students regardless of their… characteristics”,
in an attempt to meet their public equality duty.
Mr Marsden
I will give way to the hon. Member for Taunton Deane (Rebecca Pow).
Rebecca Pow
As someone who has put two daughters through university and who has a son who is thinking about where to go, I believe it is essential that more focus is put on the quality of what is offered at universities. That is what the Bill fundamentally tries to work in, which I applaud.
Mr Marsden
There is absolutely nothing wrong with quality, but we have to see where the quality extends. The truth is that that is not clear in the TEF before us.
In addition to the first year, we know that only the simplest of tests will be available to allow HE institutions to obtain tuition fee increases. In essence, it is a cash-in coupon. There are no guarantees about where that will take us in fee changes in years two and three. It is therefore not surprising that the vice-chancellor of the University of Bedfordshire, Bill Rammell, who is a former HE Minister—[Interruption.] When the Lord Commissioner of Her Majesty’s Treasury, the right hon. Member for Bexleyheath and Crayford (Mr Evennett), stops barracking from the Front Bench, he might find that one or two respondents to the Bill have close connections with the Government and the Conservative party. It is not surprising that Bill Rammell says that the TEF proposal
“risks the commoditisation of higher education”,
even if the Government have had to row back from their original plans.
It took about six years in the early 2000s to get a broadly acceptable framework for measuring research quality with the research excellence framework. Simply using existing datasets and metrics in teaching such as the national student survey will not on its own do the business. The Business, Innovation and Skills Committee said that the use of metrics as proxies for quality was problematic. Although the White Paper claims that TEF awards will add up to £1 billion in 10 years, there are no cost predictions. The Government are proceeding on the assumption that there will be only one TEF assessment per university—a one-size-fits-all approach that has been criticised by a wide range of commentators, not least at the all-party parliamentary group meeting that the Minister spoke at last December. Where is the recognition of that, and where is the strategy for finessing that assessment, which could perhaps be done by schools of humanities, science, social science and so on?