Examination of Witnesses (Questions 1080
- 1099)
WEDNESDAY 26 JULY 2000
BARONESS BLACKSTONE,
MRS VANESSA
NICHOLLS AND
MR MICHAEL
HIPKINS
1080. We are very grateful that you could reschedule
this session. Can I take you back to where we were really just
to see how you feel about where the Government is now in terms
of getting a real level of activity in terms of broadening access.
As I think I said yesterday, what we feel is that there are a
lot of well intentioned people out there but much of what they
say is slightly less professional than one would want. That may
be a question of resources, it may be a question of not really
addressing the problem in a business-like way. I wonder if we
could have your thoughts on where we are on access and what you
think the situation is.
(Baroness Blackstone) I will not go right back to
the beginning.
1081. That is on the record.
(Baroness Blackstone) I will just go back to the final
question which you put last time when I think I was telling you
we have put £35 million so far into widening access programmes
and in the latest spending review an additional £20 million.
So the resources are there now for universities really to make
something of this. I accept that some universities have a better
record than others. What I want to see is all universities successfully
achieving the highest levels of activity in recruiting students
from the widest possible range of backgrounds. I believe they
can do it. I believe that those who have lagged behind a bit can
get to the levels of those that have been more successful and
that will make a huge difference. The money can be spent on a
whole variety of different things. Some of it goes to HEFCE, which
distributes it according to the numbers of students that universities
and colleges have from disadvantaged backgrounds. Some of it is
used for project work. Some of it will be used for summer schools.
We have started a successful programme of summer schools following
on the excellent work that Peter Lampl and the Sutton Trust have
done in this area. There was rather a good article in yesterday's
Guardian setting out what some of these summer schools
have been achieving with, I thought, some interesting quotes from
some of the young people who had obviously hugely enjoyed it and
got a lot out of it. The experience had widened their horizons.
We want to see more of that kind of thing. We want to see universities
employing recruitment officers who really do the kind of outreach
that is necessary. We would like to see a lot more admissions
officers, academics, going out into the schools, especially in
the inner cities, telling them what they want, talking to the
young people themselves, the kind of thing that the Americans
have done rather well under the Gear-up Programme.
Chairman: Thank you, Minister. Charlotte?
Charlotte Atkins
1082. Are you aware of the change in FEFC funding
which will particularly affect sixth form colleges whereby a college
only gets funding for a student if that student completes a year?
What I am particularly concerned about is that in pilot areas,
like Stoke-on-Trent where there are pilots for the EMAs which
are obviously encouraging young people to come into colleges,
where that EMA encourages students to come into college and then
they drop out that leaves the local sixth form college with a
real problem in terms of funding. What I am concerned about is
the work that you are doing in the higher education sector will
be disadvantaged by de-funding, if you want, the sixth form colleges
that are trying to do a lot of work in the very inner city areas
that you are speaking about.
(Baroness Blackstone) Is there any chance we can turn
whatever it is, that noise off? I am slightly deaf and I cannot
hear very well against it. It would be really, really helpful.
Dr Harris: And if we speak up as well.
Charlotte Atkins
1083. Would you like me to repeat the question?
(Baroness Blackstone) I think I got it. It is basically
a concern that access programmes will be affected if funding in
the further education sector does not provide resources regardless
of whether students drop out or not.
1084. Exactly.
(Baroness Blackstone) That is much better, thank you.
I think it is rather difficult to go on funding an institution
where students have left so they are not being taught. I do not
think we could simply say that if your recruitment and retention
levels have been very poor, you are going to continue to get exactly
the same money as an institution which has very good recruitment
and retention levels. I do think there is a balance here that
has to be found.
1085. But is that not different from schools?
If a sixth form student in a high school were to leave half way
through the year, would that school not continue to receive the
funding?
(Baroness Blackstone) One of the things that we have
to do is to have a much more level playing field between sixth
forms and their funding and the FE sector, whether sixth form
colleges or general FE colleges. At the moment we are consulting
on a new approach to the financing of the post-16 sector where
we will hope to narrow the gap between the funding that has traditionally
been available for sixth formers compared with the FE sector.
1086. This is my last question on this. I think
the issue is particularly worrying for sixth form colleges because
obviously for FE colleges the percentage of their intake that
is likely to drop out is a much smaller group and the 16-19 age
group is obviously much less than a college that is particularly
geared just to that age group.
(Baroness Blackstone) I think there are lots of grounds
on which sixth form colleges might want to claim that they have
not been treated as well as they should be and, again, that is
something we are addressing. I am not sure that this is one really
in that drop-out rates from FE colleges are just as high as far
as the post-19 age group is concerned as they are for 16-19 year
olds. Whatever the rates are, they have got to be reduced. One
of the things the Government is very committed to try to do is
to make sure that people who start on a course complete. We really
have to work very hard to make sure that, firstly, people get
the right advice and guidance about the various alternatives so
that they take sensible decisions rather than ones that turn out
to be quite wrong for them. That is a very important area. Secondly,
that the kind of pastoral care that they get supports them so
that we do not have people just walking out because they are worried
about something; there needs to be somebody there to give them
a little bit of help. Finally, I think it is extremely important
that institutions themselves take this very seriously because
it is waste and it is people's potential not being achieved.
Dr Harris
1087. Good morning, Minister. For a poor student
from a poor background, do you think the fact that those students
no longer qualify for maintenance grants to make them less poor
while they are a student and have to rely solely on loans, thereby
increasing the debt at the end of their course of study compared
to what it was before when they were eligible for maintenance
grants, might deter any poor students anywhere from going into
higher education?
(Baroness Blackstone) All the evidence suggests students
have not been deterred because the proportion of students from
lower income families going into higher education has not changed
as a result of the introduction of the new student support system.
1088. But might it have gone up?
(Baroness Blackstone) Sorry?
1089. Might that proportion have actually gone
up had it not been for the fact that some may have been deterred
by the prospect of being poorer than they would have previously?
(Baroness Blackstone) That is a hypothetical question.
1090. Yes.
(Baroness Blackstone) And I simply cannot answer.
1091. We are talking about hypotheticals, what
if.
(Baroness Blackstone) We are now bringing in a whole
range of new initiatives which I have just been describing which
we hope will increase the proportion. These are new initiatives
so there is no particular reason why the proportion should have
gone up up until now. I would hope from now on it will start doing
so. What I am convinced of is that the student support arrangements
that have been introduced and have led to substantial extra funding
for universities are fair ones and that they have not deterred
students from lower income backgrounds, there is just no evidence
of that.
1092. If bursaries are a good thing now in order
to increase the take-up rate of higher education for students
from poorer backgrounds, would they not have been a good thing
two years ago when the grants were removed from poorer students
making them realise that they were liable to be poorer than they
otherwise would have been and in greater debt when they finally
leave university?
(Baroness Blackstone) You can always say a new initiative
that has just been introduced might have been introduced earlier,
I am not going to deny that, but the point about these new opportunity
bursaries is that they will be far more targeted than the universal
system of maintenance grants was in the past. We will get these
bursaries to students who really are from very disadvantaged backgrounds
and whose teachers, careers advisers and others, have pointed
to as people who really would be rather unlikely to take up the
option of going into higher education unless they were given some
extra help.
1093. One of your justifications for proposing
tuition fees and removing grants from poorer students and replacing
it with loan entitlement is the extra income that comes into higher
education. On that basis, using that logic, would not top-up fees
also provide extra income for higher education and, therefore,
by some logic help expansion?
(Baroness Blackstone) Top-up fees are totally different
from the system of regulated tuition fees that the Government
introduced. Top-up fees would, I think, introduce a free-for-all
of a kind that would be very, very difficult to operate in this
country. There is no tradition of this sort of totally free market
approach to higher education. I think we would find huge disparities
between different institutions in the kind of income that they
were able to generate, also in what they were charging. We would
have students very confused by the whole different range of possible
charges that they might have to pay. The Government has made it
absolutely clear that it is against top-up fees. If I could come
back to the point you were raising about a regulated tuition fee.
We have to keep reminding ourselves that if we look at young students,
a third of them pay no fees and if we look at all students it
is about 40 per cent because 85 per cent of mature students pay
no fees.
1094. I am sorry to interrupt—
(Baroness Blackstone) And that money has gone back
to universities.
Dr Harris: Those proportions are well known.
My last line is—
Chairman: We ought to allow the Minister to
make that point.
Dr Harris: The point has been made by you in
the last evidence session and it has been made on the record many
times about those proportions and we understand that. I am keen
to press you on—
Chairman: Just to get it on the record, the
Minister was saying that money has gone back to the universities.
As Chairman of the Committee I want to get that on the record.
Dr Harris
1095. Two more things on top-up fees. What do
you think the Secretary of State meant, given the opposition that
the Government says it has to top-up fees, when he said in February,
"We will not have top-up fees while I am Secretary of State
for Education, but I will not be Secretary of State forever"?
What signal did that send? What did that mean?
(Baroness Blackstone) I think that what David Blunkett
was saying was "I am not going to make predictions about
what is going to happen over the next century".
1096. Century?
(Baroness Blackstone) Any Secretary of State who tried
to do that would be, I think, perhaps a little arrogant. He also
went on to say that there is a debate going on about top-up fees,
it should be a properly conducted debate and one in which all
the evidence for and against top-up fees is brought out into the
open and then can be properly assessed. I hope that is what will
happen. The CVCP is now looking at top-up fees amongst a range
of different options for raising extra money for universities.
1097. My last question on this is that there
are senior Members of the Labour Party who really do believe that
top-up fees may well be inevitable. Our own Chairman of the Select
Committee at an AUT seminar a couple of weeks ago, Higher Education
Challenges for the New Millennium, said, on the record, "Top-up
fees need to be considered as part of the answer and no one should
be blinkered enough to say no, no, no, to rule them out".
Do you say no, no, no and rule them out?
(Baroness Blackstone) The Government has made its
position absolutely clear: top-up fees are not part of our policy
for funding universities. We have taken out reserve powers in
the Teaching and Higher Education Act and that is the position
that will continue.
Mr St Aubyn
1098. Minister, do you think the Chancellor
of the Exchequer's recent attack on Oxford was justified by the
evidence which he cited?
(Baroness Blackstone) I think what the Chancellor
was drawing everyone's attention to was the fact that some two-thirds
of students who get three As at A level come from the state sector,
one-third come from the independent sector, yet more than half
of students at the University of Oxford are recruited from independent
schools. That is something the university itself has recognised
as being unacceptable and unsustainable. I can quote from the
University's report on access last year. I see that Evan Harris
is nodding his head. They are taking action to address that and
that, I think, is what the Chancellor wanted to see happen.
1099. Sorry, do you think the problem is in
the admissions process, which was the thrust of his attack, or
is the problem, which the University tells us is the case, more
that not enough apply who are able students from less advantaged
backgrounds?
(Baroness Blackstone) I think it is a mixture of different
things. I certainly think that not enough students apply from
disadvantaged backgrounds or, indeed, just from state schools.
I also think that there may be things in the admissions process
that can be improved and that is again the view of the Vice Chancellor
of the University of Oxford. I think you took evidence from Professor
Halsey and his colleagues and what they have found is even if
you look at applications you will find that the proportion of
students applying from state schools with three As who are accepted
is lower than the proportion applying from independent schools
with three As. Again, there may be many reasons for this but I
do think it is something that needs to be looked at and I am very
glad that the University of Oxford is doing just that.
| 
