Clause 23 - Condition that may be required to be imposed by English funding bodies
Higher Education Bill
6:00 pm
Mrs Anne Campbell (Cambridge, Labour)
It seems a long time ago that I moved my amendments. I think it has been an excellent debate. There have been some very good contributions from all sides of the Committee. I feel that I now understand the issues much better than I did before, and I hope that everyone else feels the same way.
I wanted to take the opportunity to accept the apology made by the hon. Member for Harrogate and Knaresborough, but he is no longer in his place, and I understand why. Obviously things became a little heated on Tuesday, when we were arguing about this, so I want to acknowledge and accept the apology.
I begin by reiterating the point I made in an intervention on my hon. Friend the Member for Bury, North about the nature of the market. We did hear some contributions about the market system and its nature. Many people were saying that there is a market at the moment, and all we are doing by introducing a variable fee is enhancing the market. However, there is a big difference. At the moment, the market is about
A-level grades. That is the currency used. It is used by the student to try to negotiate the best possible place, and it is used by the university when deciding whether to accept students. It is far from being a perfect market. It is imperfect for many reasons, one of which—and it is one of the most frustrating from my point of view—is the ignorance of the system by the student.
One of the reasons that Cambridge, probably Oxford and many of the other Russell Group universities do not get their full quota of low-income students is that those students do not understand that there is a generous system of bursary support at many of the elite universities, which can be just as welcoming and as appropriate for students from lower-income backgrounds as for those from middle-class backgrounds. It is terribly important that we watch our language when we are talking about this, because I have picked up the Liberal Democrats on several occasions for making remarks that add to the perception that the elite universities are not for lower-income students.