Higher Education and Research Bill

Viscount Hanworth Excerpts

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

[Viscount Hanworth (Lab)]

My Lords, I begin by declaring that I have spent my working life as an academic in British universities.

The objective of the Higher Education and Research Bill is to further the marketisation of higher education and to increase competition within the sector. Universities have traditionally undertaken functions and have operated in ways that no competitive profit-seeking organisation would consider. They have co-operated widely across the sector in maintaining the quality of their teaching and the uniformity of their standards of assessment. Many of their activities have been predicated upon a degree of cross-subsidisation that no commercial organisation would tolerate. Latterly, technical and scientific departments of multifaculty universities have been heavily subsidised by departments of arts, humanities and social sciences that have much lower costs and are able to attract students more readily. Such subsidies are now subject to severe limitations in consequence of the commercial priorities that are becoming increasingly dominant in universities.

STEM subjects and the departments that teach them are under threat, as are minority arts and humanities subjects. It is notable that these developments have been a consequence of government interventions and initiatives. In almost every aspect, they have been dysfunctional. It is hardly worth while recounting the litany of ill effects, but it might be appropriate to give one typical example of a harmful intervention. It concerns the effects of the quality assurance regimes upon the system of external examining, an arrangement whereby specialists from other universities are asked to scrutinise examination papers, to monitor and participate in the marking of scripts, and to oversee the awarding of degrees. The effect has been both to assure the quality of teaching in individual courses and to assure universality of standards among universities in the awarding of degrees.

Traditionally, external examiners have been enjoined to be unbridled in their criticisms of any deficiencies they might perceive, with the assurance that both they and the department would be protected by anonymity, or at least confidentiality. With the advent of the quality assurance regimes that have been wished upon universities by the Government, there has been a requirement to publish the external examiners’ findings. Almost all academic departments have resorted to preliminary internal examiners’ meetings, wherein any potential embarrassments are discovered and concealed from the external examiners, who now attend only the subsequent formal examiners’ meetings. A further consequence has been the practice of the quality assurance offices imposing upon the external examiners to remove from their reports even the mildest of criticisms in order that the published reports should be entirely positive. In an era in which co-operation among institutions is being replaced by competition, it seems that the role of external examiners is no longer viable.

The Higher Education and Research Bill makes it clear that the Government are not concerned with preserving uniformity of teaching quality and of standards of accreditation throughout the university sector. It is proposed that universities should be graded in respect of their putative teaching quality, for which they should be awarded a gold, silver or bronze star. It is extraordinary that anyone should consider summarising the performance of an entire multi-faculty university in this way. Moreover, the effect of being classified as a third-class or bronze-star university is liable to be both unjust and disastrous. The likelihood is that it will drive away applicants and lead to the bankruptcy of the institution.

Another highly deleterious proposal is that commercial start-up institutions should be granted their degree-awarding powers at their inception. In the past, newly established institutions of higher education had to remain under the tutelage of an existing and well-established university for a number of years. During this time, their degrees were awarded as external degrees of the sponsoring university, until full autonomy was granted. Now it is proposed that a newly established Office for Students should be responsible for granting or withdrawing the degree-awarding powers. The reasoning is that such an arrangement is necessary to avoid conflicts of interest between the start-up institution and the sponsoring university, with which it is envisaged to be in competition. Here again, we see the nostrums of competition obstructing co-operation.

The experience of start-up universities in the United States should serve as a warning of what will transpire if the Government pursue the policies outlined in the Bill. The institutions in question, which rarely deserve the title of a university, have been commercial enterprises aimed at providing the courses that are the cheapest and most profitable. They have shown a tendency to fail and to go out of business in quick time. This has left a large body of aggrieved students with heavy debts and worthless qualifications that no one is prepared to recognise. The failed Trump University is a prominent case in point. It is difficult to understand why the present Government should wish to replicate these circumstances in the UK.

I distrust this Government’s approach to the university sector, on account of both the deficiencies of their understanding and their ulterior motives. It is clear that one of the Government’s motives is to arrogate to themselves unprecedented powers to control the running of the university sector.

The teaching excellence framework, which is to be the means of assessing the performance of universities, will be based on metrics that are wholly unfit for the purpose. It will depend heavily on scores of student satisfaction, which are formed in isolation and without reference to what transpires in other institutions. These cannot be used as a standard of comparison. Indeed, it has been found that the scores are inversely related to the level of difficulty of the subjects taught and to the vigour with which they are taught. The focus on aspects such as graduate employment destinations, which are beyond the universities’ control, is a further distortion. The sooner this utter nonsense is halted, the better.

Higher Education and Research Bill

Viscount Hanworth Excerpts

Committee: 4th sitting (Hansard): House of Lords
Wednesday 18th January 2017 Lords Chamber

[Lord Jopling (Con)]

My Lords, I have a great deal of sympathy with the comments of the noble Lord who has just spoken. On the second day in Committee I drew attention to my long connection with the Court of the University of York. I have been struck by the views that it has expressed, and in particular that,

“the ratings of gold, silver and bronze risk damaging the reputation of UK HE internationally”,

through the impact of the teaching excellence framework. Of course failing institutions should be identified and dealt with, but it is very difficult to follow why the gold, silver and bronze ratings would achieve that. Instead, it would be damaging to the reputation of British higher education internationally, potentially putting off international students from coming to study in the UK. In an already challenging market for international students, this would put UK higher education at a disadvantage and have a significant economic impact.

On the second day in Committee I expressed my regret that I was not able to be present at Second Reading; I was abroad on parliamentary business. On reading that day’s debate I was struck by the very strong views that were expressed to the Government with regard to these matters. The right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Winchester said:

“Given its potential impact it is crucial that the TEF does not misrepresent university quality and create a PR nightmare”.—[Official Report, 6/12/16; col. 621.]


I am sorry to read these out but they are a reflection of the very strong feelings in the House. The noble Baroness, Lady Blackstone, said:

“Can the Minister confirm that the crude ratings of gold, silver and bronze, to which others have referred, will not be used by the Home Office in deciding on the student visa system and how it is implemented?”.—[Official Report, 6/12/16; col. 628.]


The noble Lord, Lord Giddens, said:

“Standardised metrics for teaching assessment simply will not work across the whole range of universities”.—[Official Report, 6/12/16; col. 633.]


My noble friend Lord Norton of Louth, from whom no doubt we shall be hearing in a few minutes, said:

“The likelihood is that, as with the REF, universities will engage in gaming the system and devote considerable resources to the task … the danger is that the TEF will be even more problematic. It may well serve to drive up costs rather than teaching quality”.—[Official Report, 6/12/16; col. 658.]


That, from him, with all his experience of academia, was very clear. The noble Baroness, Lady Royall, whom I see in her place, said:

“In practical terms, would a university judged to be gold one year have to reduce its fees in future years if it were then deemed bronze or silver—or, perhaps, vice versa?”.—[Official Report, 6/12/16; col. 697.]


I could go on. There is a major flaw in the Bill and the Government’s thinking on this. The noble Lord who preceded me pleaded with them to think again. I, too, say to the Minister that this will not do as it is. I hope that he will tell us that the Government will take this away and think about it again.

[Viscount Hanworth (Lab)]

My Lords, I should like to testify that there is something utterly perverse in the current system of rating the quality of the provisions of individual departments within universities and of universities as a whole. The system depends on the National Student Survey, which aims to determine the degree of customer satisfaction. Because the ratings of the NSS are determined within these organisations, and because they can make no reference to what is happening elsewhere, they cannot possibly serve as a valid standard for comparison across the sector.

The NSS is subject to the social dynamics of small groups of students, and it can produce highly variable results from year to year. It is well known that it can be strongly influenced by the interaction of staff with students. There is a strong temptation for academics to appeal to their students, in ways that may be more or less subtle, to give ratings that will be beneficial both to themselves and to their students. This has often swayed the outcomes. Quite apart from these difficulties in assessing the true degree of customer satisfaction, it is questionable whether customer satisfaction should be the principle to guide the provision of teaching. It is now a principle that also guides many other aspects of the provision to students. The quality of sports facilities, catering, entertainment and much else besides has been influenced by the need to increase student satisfaction.

However, the effects on teaching of an adherence to this principle can be dire. It has been a common experience that, the more difficult a course and the more vigorously it is taught, the lower is its NSS rating. University administrators, who nowadays control the activities of academic staff, have requested the removal of courses that have scored badly. Among such courses have been some of the essential STEM courses, which often form the backbones of academic disciplines. I propose that we cease to use the NSS as a basis for assessing the qualities of universities. We should cease to make such assessments, or to use them, until we can be sure of their validity.

[Lord Lipsey (Lab)]

My Lords, I chair the Trinity Laban Conservatoire of Music and Dance, which I think is a very effective conservatoire. On Monday night I was closeted with my board, making one of the most difficult decisions that as chairman I have faced: should we go in to the TEF, which I think is supposed to close in about a week’s time, or not? The situation was simple. None of us thinks anything of it, particularly because of the presence within it of the metric of the National Student Survey, on which I will say a bit more in a minute and a lot more in our next debate.

But if we did not go in for it, we would have £250 less per student to spend on teaching, on instruments and on bringing them up to our very high standard. The board decided to go ahead. I very much hope that, before we finish with the Bill, they will be shown to have been right for a different reason—because the Government have backed off from these really very ill-considered decisions.

Incidentally, I endorse what the noble Lord, Lord Kerslake, said about Chris Husbands: if there is a man who can sort out TEF, it is Chris, and we should wish him every power and a fair wind from Ministers at his back.

I am a bit of a statistician; I chair the All-Party Group on Statistics. I will go into this in more detail on a subsequent occasion, as I said, but the NSS seems to be a statistic that makes the statement on the side of the Leave buses an exemplar of statistical validity. It is just frightful. In particular, for a small institution such as mine, the sample sizes are tiny. It has had the most coruscating reviews from the Royal Statistical Society. The Office for National Statistics put it more cautiously but nevertheless said the same thing: you cannot use it to compare institutions—which is exactly what the gold, silver and bronze ratings do.

This is the first time that a piece of legislation for the post-fact era, where facts no longer matter, has made it to the statute book. It must be changed. Fortunately, it can relatively easily be changed, because I think we are all after the same thing: we are after a true measure of teaching effectiveness. I do not mean just whether students like it. At one stage, I joked to my board that I was thinking of withdrawing all music teaching at Trinity Laban and instead providing free beer in the bar every night. They would be jolly satisfied with the quality of their courses if they had free beer every night, but they would not be learning to play their instruments—which is bloody hard work, I can tell noble Lords who have not tried it. For that reason, this metric is dotty.

I have one or two other points to make. Information is very important in the new era. It is difficult enough to choose an institution now and, if the Government get their way and there is a proliferation of institutions, it will be more difficult in future for students to choose institutions. One thing that does not help is misinformation. We did not do terribly well in the National Student Survey this year. It was fine for me because I was able to say, as I had pointed out every year to the board, that the previous year had been completely different, because this number fluctuates almost completely randomly. But I had members of staff who were reduced to tears and considering resignation because we had a bad NSS score. Think how much more that will be so if it is incorporated into the midst of the TEF. Managers would then say, “You have a very bad NSS score, so we will do badly in the TEF, so we will have less grant”. The pressure will be enormous, crushing and based on wholly false information. We need proper information and a proper TEF based on the kind of assessment that Chris, with his team, is well capable of undertaking. New metrics are being developed that would help with this, although whether they will be available under the Government’s timetable is not yet clear.

We can get a TEF that works, which I would welcome. There are institutions that have not been as successful in their teaching as they have in other aspects of their work. If it fulfilled the Conservative election manifesto in the process, that is the sort of thing that we have to put up with in life. But please do not let us take this false step of a phony TEF that will reward only those who are good at gaming these things, not those who are doing what we really want: teaching well.

Higher Education and Research Bill

Viscount Hanworth Excerpts

Committee: 5th sitting (Hansard): House of Lords
Monday 23rd January 2017 Lords Chamber

Moved by

[Viscount Hanworth]

166A: Clause 23, page 14, line 30, leave out from “may” to “of” and insert “appoint an independent body to make assessments”

[Viscount Hanworth (Lab)]

My Lords, Amendment 166A and the allied Amendments 168A and 173 propose that the body that is to judge the quality of the teaching and the standard of assessment in universities should be independent of the Office for Students. Amendment 173 declares that no members of the body should also be members of the Office for Students.

These amendments are overshadowed by my noble friend Lord Stevenson’s amendments that give a detailed remit to a proposed independent office of quality assurance. No doubt he will speak persuasively to those amendments with his customary wit and wisdom, but in effect, they propose re-establishing the existing Quality Assurance Agency, or the QAA, under another name and on a different constitutional basis. This raises the question of why the role of the independent QAA should not be perpetuated. This is not a rhetorical question; it is a genuine request for a response from the Government.

However, I will not hesitate to suggest that, as it stands, the Bill will allow the quality assurance regime to become subject to much closer oversight and control from the Secretary of State than has been the case hitherto. If that were to be the case, I am bound to say that it would be likely to have very deleterious consequences. I should be honest at this point about declaring that, notwithstanding the respect that it has acquired, the effect of the existing QAA regime has been deleterious.

I can imagine that when it was first established, there was thought to be a need for a formal centralised system of quality control. This I would like to dispute. Despite many impressions that may have been fostered by the campus novels of the 1960s and the 1970s, universities were well regulated as regards both the quality of their teaching and their standards of assessment. As I mentioned at Second Reading, this was achieved largely through the system of external examining, whereby universities appoint persons from other institutions to monitor their examination procedures and to assess their methods of teaching.

The detailed findings of the external examiners were private to the institutions concerned, albeit that any lapses in standards would quickly become common knowledge throughout the university sector as a whole. The system of external examining not only served to keep the teaching within academic departments up to the mark, but also ensured a degree of uniformity in the standards within particular academic disciplines throughout the sector. With the advent of the formal quality assurance regime and with the duty to publish the findings of external examiners, a great pressure arose to ensure that any publicity would be good publicity. The quality assurance officers within individual institutions worked assiduously to this end and they often imposed upon the external examiners, asking them to amend any comments that seemed to be critical. Thus the purpose of the regimes of external examining has been utterly subverted. This is only one of the many ill effects of a formalised centralised quality assurance regime that I can instance; there are many others.

In view of these experiences, I have some misgivings regarding the prescriptions of my noble friend Lord Stevenson. Nevertheless I am bound to support them on the grounds that they emphasise the need for academic independence and that they tend to remove matters of quality assurance from the direct influence of the Secretary of State. I hope that in replacing the existing Quality Assurance Agency by a newly founded system there will be some regard to its failures and some recognition of the qualities of the pre-existing system that I have described. I beg to move.

[Lord Stevenson of Balmacara (Lab)]

My Lords, I have a significant number of amendments in this group. I thought that for the convenience of the House, I should introduce them at this stage so that the debate can be as full as it can be. I support the comments made by my noble friend Lord Hanworth. He is right in describing where my amendments would take us. I do not specifically say that I would rule out the continuation of the existing QAA. Indeed, this group is wide enough to allow a number of different interpretations and some of the amendments do concern the status quo ante. However, the amendment at the heart of this group would create a new independent body. This would probably be best achieved by transmogrifying the QAA but it does not require that.

The new clause in Amendment 170A sets up a body called the Quality Assurance Office, which has come largely from discussions and debates around the sector. It has gained considerably by comments made by the Council for the Defence of British Universities, an organisation that has attracted a lot of attention from Members of your Lordships’ House and more widely in the sector. I am grateful to it not only for its ideas and discussion but also for some of the drafting in these amendments.

Amendment 170A therefore sets up a new body. Amendment 201A sets out the functions of that body. It is a key point that it would be independent of the Office for Students and of the Secretary of State, with a focus on responsibility for qualities and standards. Amendment 213A inserts a revised schedule setting out the detail of QAO which replaces that which appears in the Bill for a committee to deal with standards. Amendment 217A sets out how the QAO will be funded. We are thus presenting a complete package. It would be relatively easy for the Minister to respond by saying that he accepts every word of it. I am sure that as I sit down I shall hear him say exactly that.

To be serious, the reasons for these amendments are in two groups. The first group is about the creation, in the Office for Students, of what I think is primarily a regulator. I say that partly because that is how it has been described by the Minister, although in his recent letter he tries to backtrack a little from that in saying that it is not a regulator as one would understand the term “regulator” since it will not acquire with its establishment any of the functions currently given by the code of regulators. This is neither one answer nor another. We shall have to come back to this problem. What we know is that the regulatory structure in higher education is becoming more complex because of the requirements in the Consumer Rights Act 2015 which made the CMA responsible—although there were powers before that—for obtaining undertakings from universities and higher education providers in order to ensure that they were operating with the proper integrity required of bodies offering services to those consumers who wished to take them up.

So we have a rather complicated field. The letter from the Minister dealt in part with this, but it does not quite answer all the questions. I hope we will get some more information from him during this debate. Either today, or at some future date, we will know that the Office for Students is indeed a regulator. However, in the Bill as currently drafted, it has responsibility for setting up committees or, in some cases, direct functions relating to quality assessment and fair access; the statistical underpinning of these areas and validation. Indeed, it is appointed as validator of last resort. This would be a situation which is unparalleled in the regulatory framework: a body which is not only responsible for the health, existence and support of the bodies which it is regulating, but also has the power to deregister them and shut them down. At heart, it is an all-singing, all-dancing model which has been tried in other areas and just does not work. Such a body is not right in principle and will not work in practice. That is the first strand—what the Bill is trying to set up is not the most efficient and effective way of operating in this sector.

--- Later in debate ---

[Viscount Younger of Leckie]

My Lords, Clause 23 establishes powers for the Office for Students to assess the quality and standards of higher education. It updates and modifies the current duty on HEFCE to do this.

I should like to say a few words about standards. As the Committee will know, we have already had a useful debate about the inclusion of standards in Clause 23. I reiterate that the intention here is not to weaken or undermine current sector responsibilities and ownership in relation to academic standards. I recognise noble Lords’ concerns. I have been listening, and continue to do so carefully, considering the points that have been raised.

These amendments touch on the importance of co-regulation and how that will be supported through the roles of the designated quality body and the quality assessment committee. They all give welcome recognition to the value of having an independent quality body to undertake the assessment functions under Clause 23, with effective independent oversight built into the quality system. That is why under the Bill the OfS must establish an independent quality assessment committee to provide quality oversight, and is given powers to designate a quality body which is independent from government. I hope that reassures my noble friend Lord Deben. The functions of the OfS and the quality body in this area are overseen by an independent quality assessment committee. Clause 24 will ensure that the majority of its members are not members of the OfS, while offering it the flexibility to draw on the expertise of individual OfS members.

I wish to address the points raised by the noble Viscount, Lord Hanworth, who was supported by the noble Baroness, Lady Garden. The general theme was that we needed a body which was independent, like the QAA. However, amendments to create a new body on a statutory footing, solely responsible for quality assessment without any links to the OfS, would remove the important ability for the system to operate as one and abolish the system of co-regulation, which has endured for almost two decades, by removing any possibility of a truly independent sector-owned body, such as the QAA, from the regulation of quality; instead creating a statutory body whose chair and chief executive are appointed by the Secretary of State. I reassure noble Lords about the independence of the designated quality body. Although the OfS, in having ultimate responsibility for the register of higher education providers, has to retain appropriate oversight and contact with the designated quality body, the Bill is specific about how this relationship can work; for instance, granting information powers in certain instances will also allow the OfS to give the designated quality body directions which can be general only, such as when advice may be required to fit with the registration cycle. This is only on the condition that it does not undermine the quality body’s expertise.

The noble Lord, Lord Stevenson, raised an important point about the independent quality regulator. I thank him for the amount of work and thought that have gone into his huge number of amendments. The body already has to be independent of the Crown and individual higher education providers but it has to have the confidence of a broad range of higher education providers—tests it would be unlikely to meet if it was not independent. There are safeguards in the Bill which allow it to operate independently on an ongoing basis, including that the quality assessment committee will advise on the work of the OfS and quality body; that the body must have the confidence of the sector to be considered suitable, as the noble Baroness stated; and that directions from the OfS can only be general. Therefore, Clause 23 is key to maintaining a high and rigorous bar for entry into the system, while reducing the burden on those high-performing providers. I reassure the Committee again that there are safeguards built into the quality system that allow an effective co-regulatory approach to function without oversubscription from government, which noble Lords have made clear that they want. With this balance in mind, I therefore request that Amendment 166A be withdrawn.

[Viscount Hanworth]

My Lords, I do not believe that the speakers in this short debate will be entirely reassured by what the Minister has told us. It is clear that there is work to be done in this area of the Bill. I trust that the Minister will take the opportunity to react to what he has heard today and bring something back to us on Report. Therefore, I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.

Amendment 166A withdrawn.