Examination of Witnesses (Questions 200
- 216)
WEDNESDAY 12 APRIL 2000
DR ROGER
BROWN AND
PROFESSOR ROBIN
MIDDLEHURST
200. How far back?
(Dr Brown) 12, 13, 14, that sort of age, maybe even
the upper levels of primary education. My institution is now quite
active at getting subject specialists around in the schools. One
has to be realistic here, the fact is that both we and the schools
are under the pressures that I described earlier in giving evidence
about income, about protecting your lines of supply and things
of that kind. If universities and schools offer to do more here
there will have to be a further incentives for them to do so.
At the moment I can only divert funds and resources to these activities
at the expense of my teaching. My first duty, I believe, is to
the students who are currently studying at my institution.
201. You have Year 8, which is often seen as
the gap year. The Secretary of State already identified problems
with Year 8, and that is pre GCSE time. It is a time that needs
to be filled creatively. It is a real time when young people are
deciding about their futures. It is conceptualising what their
future would be rather than making narrow choices about GCSEs.
Is that not an opportunity for universities not to put a lot of
resources into schools but at least to open their doors a bit
more creatively? I am not saying it should be a one way process,
that universities should organise courses, but collaboration with
some of the better teachers in these high schools or middle schools
might lead to an effective collaboration which enriches the students
you have at your institution.
(Dr Brown) I agree with all that. I do not disagree
with the principle you are describing. It is how you operationalise
it, really, when the universities and the schools and the staff
concerned are already under very great pressure to deliver what
they are primarily paid to deliver. If you are going to do that
there has to be some fairly powerful incentives.
Charlotte Atkins: You mean more able kids.
Mr Marsden
202. I want to pursue the points that Charlotte
Atkins made because I think they are very important. Talking about
the quality of the learning experience, we also have to look at
the quality of the learning experience by those who are not currently
learning, given the target of inclusion in higher education that
is extremely important. I do take on board the point you make
about unit costs and everything. I want to ask both of you, specifically
you, Dr Brown, since you have dug your heels in on this one, what
would it take in terms of funding or how could the out-reach programme,
that we have been describing be recognised either in assessment
terms or funding from the Government, which would enable or would
enthuse universities to give the sort of big bang approach to
collaboration that we are talking about?
(Dr Brown) It would be a mixture of things. What would
help most of all would be if the continual reduction in the unit
for funding for teaching was brought to a halt. The CVCP I am
sure will have told you about the reduction in the unit of funding.
Every year we have less money to spend on a given body of activities
than we had previously. We also have to finance staff pay rises,
which are generally at or above the rate of inflation and are
not wholly catered for by the GDP inflator. That was not going
to continue. There are other ways which you can improve efficiency.
There are ways you can do it. We have learning skills councillors
coming on stream, they have no realm for higher education at the
moment, yet another example of vulcanisation of the whole area
being treated differently from higher education. There are local
mechanisms that could be created or which already exist for that
purpose and you could have lots of examples of good practice.
It is a question of how you generalise that.
203. Can I press you on that, what would you
say if the DfEE turned around to you and said, "We want to
get universities more involved in schools, we have a social inclusion
agenda. We will freeze these unit cost reductions or we might
even give you a marginal increase, providing that that money or
those resources are hypothecated into schools out-reach.
(Dr Brown) Provided there was consultation on what
was done and how it was done that would send a very clear indication
to institutions.
(Professor Middlehurst) I just have a question about
whether you get the best results from saying that every institution
has to do all of these things and whether you might not get a
better solution and more involvement if institutions could choose
which particular initiatives they are following.
204. You target certain universities, for want
of a better word, as community universities and you give them
additional funding?
(Dr Brown) They would target themselves.
205. It is self-selecting, shall we say.
(Professor Middlehurst) One of the difficulties is
the very expensive research agenda at one end of the spectrum
and the very expensive widening participation agenda at the other
are all competing for the same resources in terms of time and
staff.
206. That is fine if you are in the community—I
am going to mention universities—in Staffordshire or in
central Lancashire or in Portsmouth. It may not be fine—I
am not going to name others who are not doing it - if you are
in another part of the country where a Russell Group university
has resolutely set its face against that sort of community - out
reach.
(Dr Brown) The issue then is you have to decide whether—what
one of your colleagues was leading to you—you have to seriously
engage the university in widening participation because it is
such an overwhelming, important subject that you have to encourage
everyone to do it. That is the policy decision you have to take.
Chairman
207. Given that you have some questions about
that sort of involvement across the board, given the recent publication
of the Sutton Trust—showing how few students from private
communities and from lower income families get to university,
indeed very, very few get to the top rated thirteen universities—if
it is not community involvement how do you break through that
cycle of difficulty of getting a broader spread of able children
from the more deprived communities into our universities, indeed
into our more prestigious universities?
(Dr Brown) From higher educations point of view the
difficulty is the absence of appropriately qualified people coming
forward.
208. Is it? I thought it was a very high percent.
50 per cent of children with three As were actually in average
comprehensives, it is just that the top thirteen do not recruit
them. There are a lot of highly qualified kids from comprehensive
schools.
(Dr Brown) We are not in conflict with one another.
I am simply saying that there are not sufficient numbers in aggregate
terms of people coming forward. My view is that you have to go
much further back into the process. I am sure you do not want
to hear my views on the school system, maybe you do.
209. Briefly.
(Dr Brown) The way in which the school system is organised,
I would say particularly the primacy of A-level as effectively
the premier school leaving qualification, suits higher education
very well because it is effectively a selective entry exam for
higher education. That is why some of the changes will certainly
help. As you know, I am sure almost everyone agrees, the vocational
route into higher education has always been the Cinderella, therefore
the broadening of the school curriculum will make a big difference
over time to some of these issues.
Dr Harris
210. One of the areas we might be looking at
is the interface between school leaving and higher education.
Do you think there is an argument for being more radical in changing
school leaving and qualification to make them more transferable
and lifelong?
(Dr Brown) You have to decide what you want from your
higher education system. If we now want to go down the inclusiveness
participatory route, which is where the questions I am getting
now are going, then you have to have a different approach to the
way in which higher education relates to other areas of education.
I made the rather obvious point that the New Learning Skills Council
have no remit for higher education and yet the intention is a
lifelong learning agenda. Higher education has to be brought into
that broader debate and it has to be much more closely articulated
with other forms of education and training than is currently the
case. I do not see much sign of that at the moment but it could
happen and new regional structures on open learning source councils
could have that role if they had their remits extended to higher
education. There are ways which you can do it. You then have to
decide if that is the type of higher education you want to have
and if you are prepared to tolerate higher rates of drop-out and
more variable levels of quality. You cannot have it both ways,
you can either have an elite higher education system which has
very "high standards" or you go down the American route
of having a much more varied higher education system, which puts
a much larger proportion of the people through the system but
probably leaves them with exit qualifications that are not "as
high as ours". That is a fundamental policy choice which
I do not see anybody wanting to take.
Chairman
211. We are coming to the end of the evidence
session, which has been extremely valuable. What you were coming
to and what we were skirting around in the last five or ten minutes
has really been the institutional appropriateness. There has been
indications from the Secretary of State and others that perhaps
we have to re-think the fitness of the institutional structures.
Do you think that is right? Do you think there ought to be clearer
differentiation between the roles of different institutions, should
we not take that in hand?
(Dr Brown) I think it is inevitable that there will
be that differentiation. The most fundamental point I would make
is that you have to decide what you want your higher education
system to do. At the moment we have a system which is more or
less based upon elite lines, struggling to meet a whole series
of different demands. What I would like to see is a much more
open and inclusive system, a much broader system but a much greater
variety of institutional missions and types acknowledged, maybe
with some clarification of those types. All I would say about
that is that you do not want to have too rigid a distinction between
the types of institutions otherwise you lose the dynamics that
comes from new institutions developing and meeting new student
needs or new local needs. In a way they cannot if you have a very
rigid typology of institutions.
212. Some people would argue that is what we
moved to.
(Dr Brown) We may have moved to it but we have not
acknowledged it. We continue with lots of processes that cut across
it.
(Professor Middlehurst) If I may just add to that,
I think that the benefit to the nation, if not more widely, is
to have that level of diversity to meet different needs and different
requirements. There has to be some easing-up at the institutional
level and it comes backs to funding the mechanisms for quality,
which actually drive institutional behaviour. If you look at university
missions, as I am sure you have, you will find they are exactly
the same, they are not differentiated enough.
Mr O'Brien
213. Part of the institutional behaviour and
the approach is very much dictated by the existing physical environments
and geography that we have. It seems to me there must be an issue.
I would be interested in your views, about the new technology
having an effect on the way learning is both received and transmitted,
both in terms of what we were discussing before in our universities
and their local communities and reaching beyond schools to the
fact that campuses, particularly those where they are part of
a town or a city environment, are very much a part of everyone
coming together for a learning opportunity. The new technology,
it appears to me, is now beginning to threaten that natural need
to physically come together, not least when you think of the research
issues which are also, if you like, more hived-off than they were
before. Is that a fair reflection?
(Professor Middlehurst) I think it goes in both directions.
New technology can drive you to an extreme focus on research in
that sort of community, extreme focus on doing distant learning
teaching. Equally, as we found again, you may find it more in
the continuing education departments than else where, there is
potential that new technology allows a community school to develop
where a university can be delivering its education in the schools,
to the wider community and indeed in libraries and learning centres
through the learning skills councils. It is beginning to happen
but it is very young at the moment.
(Dr Brown) Genius loci will still have an important
part to play in higher education. People will want to come together.
Even if they are working with screens they will want to come together
for colloquia, to consider papers and things of that kind. That
will still be a valuable part.
Mr Marsden: That is the existing experience
in the Open University, is it not?
Chairman: It always seemed to me that it was
a fallacy. The great expectation was that you get the best professors
in the world on the screen and everyone sits at home and gets
an equal education through one of the most prestigious institutions
in the world. Students wanted face-to-face contact.
Mr Marsden: They still want the summer schools.
Chairman
214. Although there was a breakthrough, academics
were actually working as a team producing course material, which
I think has been under-rated in research. The last question, it
is not a question, it is for you to give yourself a question.
I know it is frustrating to come away from a session like this
where you have given a lot of great evidence and in the car or
on the tube going home you will say, "Why did they not ask
me this"? Is there anything you wish you had been asked by
the Committee that you think we have left unsaid?
(Dr Brown) I feel what we now need, and maybe your
Committee's enquiry will be a way of achieving this, is open and
honest debate about what should be the purposes of higher education
and the higher education system and where we are in terms of time
with all of the information coming from Robin Middlehurst's report.
Once you have done that you can decide what kind of institution
you want to have and what kind of funding and assessment regime
you want. I have been engaged in higher education policy since
1987. In all that time a whole series of incremental decisions
have been taken which get further and further away from any kind
of sensible discussion about the way the system should evolve.
I mentioned a moment ago about the Learning Skills Council, which
remit starts at pre-university. I feel that until we have had
that discussion—it should have happened with Dearing but
perhaps it did not for various reasons—and have some agreement
you will never have the basis for proceeding forward. You have
to decide how much you want to have higher education as a vehicle
for social participation and what sort of price you are prepared
to pay for it and what other things might be lost or what kind
of separate institutions you have for that purpose. You have to
decide whether you want all institutions to be involved in it
or just those you choose to be. I fear that until we have that
kind of debate we will get deeper and deeper into these issues
and we will keep coming back to them because the basic questions
have not been resolved.
(Professor Middlehurst) The question I expected to
be asked is, "What is stopping higher education deliver some
of the agendas we have been discussing today?" My answer
would be that what is stopping higher education is two things,
one, an attempt to follow every single agenda and spreading the
resources quite thinly and, secondly, tremendous emphasise on
checking and auditing absolutely everything all of the time. Going
from a quality agency into an institution the experience is very,
very sharp from the other side of inspection by the TTA, inspection
by the professional bodies, inspection by the QAA, inspection
by the REE. My small unit are facing all of those in one year.
Staff time is hugely taken up by doing that when we could be in
schools doing out-reach.
Mr Marsden
215. Staff focus or not, when we had the OFSTED
inquiry that was one of the arguments that was persistently put
to us by teachers, they were teaching to the OFSTED inquiry.
(Dr Brown) Institutions put an enormous amount of
effort into preparing for these things, there is a whole army
of people who go around preparing them.
(Professor Middlehurst) Not to mention the football
trade in staff and the attempt to keep staff and the distortion
that applies through that.
Chairman
216. I hear you say that with great feeling.
Both of you have been gamekeepers turned poachers or poachers
turned gamekeepers. Can I thank you for your evidence today. I
hope you remain in communication because this is too important
not to make a difference. You have been speaking to the right
people here in terms of learning skills, four or five of my colleagues
are on the Learning Skills Standing Committee.
(Dr Brown) If we can be of any further assistance
please contact us.
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