Rating the quality and standards of higher education

Part of Higher Education and Research Bill – in a Public Bill Committee at 10:30 am on 11 October 2016.

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In terms of the teaching excellence framework and the proposal as to how the ratings work and how the tuition fee will be linked to it, we should think about the people who advise those who might apply to universities. It was interesting to see the comments of the spokesperson for the large independent schools talking about this in the TES at the end of August. He said:

“What does this tell us about the way the HE sector views itself? Is it becoming fundamentally more commercialised? Are universities simply in a fight for survival”—

he is talking about the rise in fees—

“Or are they just realistically pointing to the cost of what is still, let’s not forget, a world-class sector?”

The Committee will have to excuse my French, as it were, but this is what he says:

“Perhaps, once the python has swallowed the pig, £9,250 has been accepted with a shrug of the shoulders and once-a-year rises are the norm throughout our big HE sector, this little storm will seem irrelevant. But I doubt it. Prospective students…need more than ever to consider their options carefully. For many, a strong UK university degree will still be absolutely the right thing…For others, a free…degree apprenticeship will be a better option.”

He also said others may look abroad and that

“as we take transition from school to university more seriously, it will be interesting to know how many of our graduates decide their degree was not worth the money paid.”

The Minister will have had representations, and rightly so, from the Campaign for British Universities and others on the alternative white paper, which suggests that the Bill should include

“A major opportunity…to review and reduce the burden of red tape facing all UK institutions. Yet this bill proposes additional and wasteful bureaucracy.”

It also makes the point that

“the TEF’s costs will be borne by universities themselves, which will be forced to pass on these costs to students and their families. And, since even the highest TEF scores will only allow fee increases equal to inflation”

that will be a problem. It continues:

“The TEF is also entirely wasteful because there is simply no solid evidence that UK university teaching is of such poor quality that additional regulation is needed.”

I do not entirely share that perspective, but I do share the concerns of those people who are worried that the calibre of their teaching and what they are doing will be significantly affected by the way in which the Government are linking the TEF with increased tuition fees.

The TEF process really ought to have more debate on the Floor of the House. If the Opposition had greater confidence that the Minister and his team were looking at that broader element, we might be less severe in our criticisms. However, it is not just us saying such things. In the Royal Academy of Engineering’s submitted evidence, HERB 41, it welcomed the principle of the TEF and said it has

“long argued for improvements in the balance of teaching”.

However, it also talked about the importance of the

“use of benchmarks for comparison between universities on aspects such as ethnicity and socio-economic deprivation.”

Indeed, those are issues that my hon. Friends have already talked about. It continued:

“The Academy would like to see the TEF move towards a discipline based measure as soon as possible, as a TEF score for an entire university will not provide any meaningful data”.

Therein lies the nub of it. That is an issue on which the Minister has been questioned on several occasions in diverse places and on which, thus far, we have no answers.

It is not unreasonable for people to be concerned about where that is going. It is not unreasonable for us to ask questions, and it is certainly not unreasonable for us to ask them when, yet again, we see the Government trying to shoehorn through a measure without proper scrutiny in the House, linking it in a way that will not be valuable and successful for our students or for our universities.

I remind the Minister that the two-year period the Bill proposes we now commence, of an “as you were” situation that will allow universities to increase their tuition fees to a yet unknown amount, will coincide with a period of huge political uncertainty as we manage to negotiate—or not, given the Government’s current record—a satisfactory outcome to the referendum. We see today in the foreign exchange figures and all sorts of other figures how uncertain that process will be. We know already of the blockages and concerns in terms of research that HE institutions in this country say they will face as a result of Brexit, and we will no doubt return to those issues in part 3 of the Bill. In that situation, maintaining the quality of our universities and the understanding of the quality of UK plc internationally will be crucial.

We only get one chance with these things. If the Government ruin the potential of a teaching excellence framework by linking it inappropriately, by not addressing some of the major issues I have talked about and by producing a situation where students and universities feel unsatisfied and the rest of the outside world wonders what on earth is going on, they will inflict damage on the HE sector in this country—unwantedly—that would take decades to recover from. It is an act of complete and supreme folly at this time to use party political games to avoid having to make decisions about inflation-based rises in tuition fees and to shoehorn that into a framework that was never designed for that process. That is why we are profoundly concerned by clause 25 and the way in which the Minister has responded, and we shall oppose clause stand part.