Clause 30 - General duties of relevant authority
Higher Education Bill
2:30 pm
Mr David Rendel (Shadow Minister (Higher Education), Education & Skills; Newbury, Liberal Democrat)
I have just met a group of young students from my constituency and was able to tell them that I was in the middle of probably my longest speech in the House of Commons. I spoke for around an hour in our sitting this morning and it is now more than three hours since I started my speech. I shall not take too much more time.
I was responding to an intervention from the hon. Member for Epsom and Ewell (Chris Grayling), who said that A-levels, if not the sole criterion for university entrance, should play a part. I was agreeing and did not want him to think that I thought that A-levels had no part to play in the choice of students who are offered places at university. I was about to say that some people had gone to
university without having any A-levels, perhaps as mature students. A-levels are a useful, but not necessarily essential, part of the criteria to be used in choosing who goes to university.
In terms of the Conservative amendment, it is hard to measure how difficult it is to decide how to choose people on the basis of their academic ability and potential. Examinations are only part of the process. Is the hon. Gentleman suggesting that if A-levels are not the only way of judging the ability and potential of applicants, all applicants will have to be interviewed? I have some sympathy with the use of interviews as another way of sorting out those who have the greatest ability and those who have a lesser ability, but they also pose problems.
The first is the problem of cost and timing if we continue with the present system. Many of us—the Minister indicated earlier that he might agree with this—think that it would be better to change the system so that applications are made only after A-level results are known at the end of a fifth term of an applicant's final year. That might help, but there would be a problem in interviewing everyone who applied to university because of the cost and the time involved in that process.
Another problem that has become apparent is the quality of interviewers. Most interviewers are lecturers at the universities concerned and not all of them have been well trained in interviewing techniques. Some may not be good interviewers, so the whole business may become a lottery. I have always told my family and other youngsters who apply to Oxford and Cambridge that entrance to those universities is a matter of luck. Many students could make good use of an Oxford or Cambridge course and have the necessary academic ability, but it so often seems to be a matter of luck as to who interviews them. Some people have an interviewer with whom they click and who immediately takes to them as a person and sees their abilities. Others have an interviewer who may be shy or does not know much about interviewing techniques and may make the wrong choice. I have always tried to persuade those who go for an interview at Oxford or Cambridge that it is a matter of luck as to whether they are accepted and that there are many good universities elsewhere if they do not get into those two.