Examination of Witness(Questions 80-96)
RT HON
CHARLES CLARKE,
MP
WEDNESDAY 11 DECEMBER 2002
Jeff Ennis
80. We have seen quite an expansion, Secretary
of State, since we came to power (and we got it as high as 50%
by 2000) of students going to higher education but since we have
come to power we have not seen the same rise in the number of
students from poorer backgrounds going to university. What is
your analysis of why we have failed as a Government in achieving
that objective so far?
(Mr Clarke) I will tell you what I really think about
this. There is a bit of it that is about money but I do not think
the principal thing is about money. I think the relationship between
secondary schools and universities is far worse than it should
be if we are going to tackle this. We have got too many secondary
schools in precisely the area we are talking about which are not
performing well enough (if you look at the statistics this is
manifest) and too many of those schools where there is not enough
of an aspiration to go to university and too much of an elitism
by universities who are not really willing to talk to people more
directly about how to do this. It is that relationship which is
the key thing we have to address. I shall make proposals in January,
and for me this is an absolutely key area to get right because
if we are talking about 43% or 50%[4]or
whatever in higher education we have got to crack the proportion
coming from working-class families. My own view is that it is
not just money, I think it is about the cultural issues around
school and university relationships.
81. I know you have visited my constituency
in the past, Secretary of State, and I know you have been a visitor
to my own village of Grimethorpe, and I am sure you are aware
that my constituency has the lowest level of GDP per capita in
the country. You have mentioned the fact that you are reviewing
higher education funding, and my bottom line will be that I will
be supporting the system which will encourage more children from
poorer backgrounds to go to university. That is my grand objective.
Is that your grand objective as well?
(Mr Clarke) Yes, with one qualification: I think how
we do it is quite difficult but I agree that that should be the
objective. I am happy to say that publicly here. I do remember
visiting Grimethorpe, and you will know Grimethorpe far better
than I, and it is a story of our failure—going back to the
conversation we had earlier about the Learning and Skills Council—to
look at it after industrial change and see what we can bring out
of it that is positive for the future. That is a failure and we
should just hold up our hands to that. If we cannot achieve a
situation where your constituents who are now 14 or 15 can realistically
look to university as an option for them, then we will not be
doing the job that we have. If I had a choice between the 50%
target for the age group and getting a higher proportion from
Grimethorpe and communities such as that into university, I would
choose the latter not the former. If that was the choice. I do
not think it is actually the choice but if it was.
Chairman
82. I am sure that the Yorkshire or Yorkshire-associated
Members of this Committee, Secretary of State, will remind you
that the evidence given to this Committee when it looked at higher
education showed, quite surprisingly, that it was your region,
the eastern region, which was the lowest achieving region of all
the regions of the United Kingdom. So this disadvantage appears
in all sorts of places.
(Mr Clarke) I will tell you why, Chairman. In the
county of Norfolk—and this is the only political point I
will make today—where the Conservatives have controlled
the county for 96 years, in the education of rural Norfolk they
honestly did not raise people's eyes above farming for the future.
The Lib-Dem pact (I hesitate to use the word) then came into office
and started to improve what was happening and drive it forward.
There are too many parts of East Anglia which did not have a history
of industrial revolution like Yorkshire where ambitions were too
low, and that is what has affected it over the years.
Mr Pollard
83. I also represent the eastern region, as
the Secretary of State knows, and certainly in my area we are
doing particularly well on going to universities because we have
got more PhDs in my constituency than any other constituency throughout
the United Kingdom. Putting that to one side, Secretary of State,
we need more money into higher education—there is no question
about it—but I bring a message from Middle England to tell
you that up with top-up fees they will not put. My university,
Hertford University, has said they do not like the idea either
and the British Council yesterday said they were worried about
foreign students coming across, and all of that, and certainly
my constituents are adamantly opposed to top-up fees—front-end
top-up fees. Later on in the scheme of the things they might look
at that, and I fully support that, but I wonder if you could say
something about that?
(Mr Clarke) Firstly I hear the message. It will not
shock the Committee that I have heard that message from some other
areas as well. I have tried, to be blunt, to talk to a lot of
colleagues about this in a large variety of ways. My only regret
is that the words "top-up fees" have become a shorthand
which I think is not helpful. It actually means two things to
people. It means up-front fees, which you were implying in your
question, it also means varying fees between different courses
and HEIs, and entirely different arguments apply to those two
things. I hope that we can disentangle some of that in the proposals
that we come forward with in January. My answer is partly coloured
by an answer I gave to Mr Ennis which is that if we were to put
in place proposals which seriously financially inhibited his constituents
making choices to go forward to university, then I think that
would be a failure. That is not a path we want to go down, as
the Prime Minister made clear in the debate last Wednesday.
Chairman
84. Before we get into that wider debate, Secretary
of State, I hope you would remember (I am sure someone has pointed
it out) our report on student finance, which we did in something
of a hurry because we thought the Government was going to be publishing
rather earlier than they have. There are parts of that area that
we would like to get into in terms of more work on a graduate
tax and bonds and so on which we did not really have time to do,
but one clear message that did come from our report is that is
if you want to know why people fail to get into university from
poorer backgrounds, it is because they disappear much earlier,
at 16 or 14. We made a very strong recommendation on EMAs keeping
young people into education. Most of the people who get to 18
with qualifications get into university.
(Mr Clarke) I read the report, I thought it was a
very good report. You will know that the Chancellor has taken
action on EMAs already and you may be interested to know that
we are also considering higher EMAs aimed at keeping youngsters
in the process. That is why I said earlier the principal reason
is this university relationship where a lot of the core problem
actually is.
Paul Holmes
85. In the arguments on financing higher education,
tuition fees, top-up fees, abolishing grants to poorer students
altogether and so on and so forth, we keep being told it is quite
right that students should pay towards their higher education
because, on average, graduates earn £400,000 more than non-graduates,
but is it not therefore also true that if they are earning £400,000
more on average than a non-graduate, they are also paying, depending
on whether they pay basic rate of income tax or higher rate, between
£90,000 to £160,000 more income tax anyway, which is
far more than the cost of a university course, so are they not
paying already through the taxation system?
(Mr Clarke) That is true. I think the £400,000
figure is a debating point more than anything else because the
argument is should an individual pay or not, does it produce a
benefit or not, and that figure has been produced as an exemplification
of the situation. You have to decide as a matter of policy whether
you think students should make any contribution themselves to
their higher education. I think they should; I do not know what
you feel about it. I think there is an issue here that I would
argue for two different reasons. One is it gives more resource
to universities, which is quite important, but also there is a
real element of social justice here because you have a situation
where precisely the people Mr Sheerman was talking about have
no money spent on them after the age of 16 in educational terms
whereas if you were to have completely free higher education for
everybody, you get another chunk of the population getting five
years' free education after that point. I would argue that that
is inequitable, particularly inequitable if you are looking at
the class basis of higher education, but also it is not focusing
on the priority that we need to focus on as a country where it
is at least argued that the priority ought to be focused on precisely
those 16, 17, 18-year-olds in order to give them a fair crack,
whether it ends up at university or not. The idea that you can
simply spend money on everything and it is all okay, I do not
think any of us who are serious politicians could possibly go
along with. I know the Liberal Democrats certainly would not.
Mr Turner
86. Kerry may have more of some types in his
constituency, I have got more criminals in mine than any other
constituency.
(Mr Clarke) What proportion are criminals with PhDs?
87. But we have one of the lowest crime rates
because they are so well looked after. What are your priorities
for prison education?
(Mr Clarke) I argued at the Home Office, where I was
responsible for police not prisoners, that if we were a government
whose priorities were education and health, the least educated
and the least healthy people in the whole of the population are
people within the criminal justice system. If you look at levels
of literacy and levels of drug abuse and more widely, that is
true. The conclusion I therefore draw is that we should be investing
in those people. The reason why we made the new arrangements was
because we felt that working together with the Home Office, which
we do, we really could improve the quality of education to people
in prison. Our biggest priority and our biggest difficulty is
the disruption that the prisoners' regime—probably not in
your high security prison but generally in prisons—gives
to anybody trying to get a coherent education programme to the
prisoners because prisoners are moved around so often for so many
different reasons. Normally what happens, because we have not
had the IT system in place, is that people are starting a bit
of a course somewhere, they are moved somewhere else and they
have to start again, and there is a complete lack of coherence.
I think the priority is to get a co-ordinated programme of education
for a prisoner which then follows him or her around in whatever
way that it happen. That is very difficult to achieve but I would
put that as my priority.
Chairman: We will talk to you again about that.
Jonathan?
Jonathan Shaw
88. Can you tell us what the gap is in terms
of graduate tax because it is very attractive to many people but
there is the shortfall in terms of when that money will actually
come on-stream to universities. How much is that?
(Mr Clarke) According to the exemplification, which
will vary according to what you put in, it is of the order of
15 to 17 years.
89. So how much money would have to be put up-front
before the graduate tax kicked in?
(Mr Clarke) It is not so much absolutely up-front,
the fact that you have a variation again according to the exemplification
as to precisely what figures are used of between £0.5 billion
and £1 billion a year over that period, so that is quite
a significant wodge. There are ways around it. The Australian
system which you have referred to, for example, which is not so
much a graduate tax as a deferred loan system, deals with it on
the basis of giving people discounts if they pay back early so
you minimise to some extent the cash flow aspect of it. It also
depends what rate of graduate tax you are talking about in a situation.
So do not take my figures too literally. What I have tried to
indicate is that you are on a correct point and one of the biggest
issues I have to address between now and the middle of January
is how to deal with that hole.
90. That is helpful, so in broad terms, ball-park
figures, we are talking between £0.5 billion and £1
billion extra per year. What about the additional money that universities
say that they need of between £8 and £9 billion? Would
it be £10 billion you would have to find because the Government
is saying universities need money for investment to be the institutes
of excellence that we need. Student finance is one part of it,
where is the rest of the money going to come from then?
(Mr Clarke) We will make our announcement—
91. Do you agree that they need this extra £8
billion?
(Mr Clarke) Let me just say firstly there will be
a significant increase for universities in the higher education
funding settlement which I will announce, so in answer to you
the state itself will be putting more money in in any case. Secondly,
I think all these descriptions of what the size of the hole is
are essentially bids, and I can accept it or not accept it, it
is not an unfair description of the state of affairs, it is like
saying you have got a massive investment gap in schools, which
we have, or whatever, they are just bids. What my commitment has
to be is to see by what means and by how much I can increase the
total resource going into universities, which is needed. I acknowledge
there is a gap and we have to put more money in. I do not think
the gap can be measured as precisely as is implied by the bid
but there is a gap . I question whether that is the amount of
money we have to raise because if the gap is X billion even if
we produce a tenth of X billion that will be a helpful contribution
to moving the situation forward. So I am not going to commit myself
to a particular figure of extra funding that we are talking about.
What I am going to say is it is our ambition to increase significantly
the amount of resource going into universities, firstly from the
state itself but also from any other sources we can achieve.
Mr Chaytor
92. Do you find it unusual that up-front fees
and differential fees had been entirely normal in further education
for 50 years but some people think it would be an outrage to introduce
it to higher education?
(Mr Clarke) I think this is a very interesting point,
it is not just further education as you say, there are differential
fees for absolutely everything in the country other than under-graduate
degrees. For post-graduate degrees there is an element of cartel
about it, nevertheless there is the freedom to charge what people
want.
Chairman
93. And foreign students.
(Mr Clarke) And foreign students. There are serious
issues and whatever regime we put into place, how we deal with
EU students is not a trivial question at all. I do think there
is an issue about this. The main reason being, however this regime
is established, there is a fear that if you have a completely
free fee-setting regime you cannot predict exactly what would
happen, it would be likely—and I think the word "likely"
is the right word to use—to have a serious discriminatory
effect against certain people in certain communities going into
some universities, and that is what people are worried about.
94. Why does the government never assess the
cost of individual courses? There is more common sense out there
amongst our electorate about a doctor or a dentist or a nuclear
physicist costing a lot more one money to train.
(Mr Clarke) What worries me is that people who want
up-front fees want to put money into research, which is not necessarily
what the fees are being paid for. There are some quite serious
issue around this area. We need more clarity about the individual
universities' finances and what they spend on research and what
they spend on teaching is important. I see three key functions
of universities—the teaching function, the knowledge transfer
function with the regional economy and the research function—and
I think more clarity about these different areas would be very
valuable. I think it is a bit strange—I put it no higher
than that—that people generally go into academic life looking
at research as their ambition and that is what they do but actually
teaching is a major part of what they do. In every other part
of the educational system the teaching is important. We need to
think hard about how teaching works and we need more priority
in teaching in what we do. This is a very difficult problem for
us to resolve. The country has grown up in a certain way through
a need to operate. One thing I want to try and avoid, which is
quite difficult, is putting in place a regime which makes it more
attractive to do subjects which are not expensive and less attractive
to do things like engineering and science which are more expensive,
and I think a funding system that cracks that will be quite difficult.
95. One of the things that members of the Committee,
certainly those who served on the former Committee and visited
the United States, would expect is that any large resource flowing
into higher education would be accompanied by efficiencies, particularly
looking at the quality of leadership and management of the universities.
We do hope what is good for the fire fighters is good for universities.
(Mr Clarke) Yes, how shall I put this diplomatically
in the context of academic freedom, I think you have a very powerful
point, and I think there are people in government who are very,
very seriously concerned about the point you raise, not just about
efficiency but about entrepreneurship in a world globalised market.
Also I come back to the access point because many people are committed
to access, quite genuinely, and the effectiveness of rolling out
that programme is demonstrated by the lack of change Mr Ennis
referred to earlier in his question, and there is a whole set
of the issues here which are quite difficult for me as Secretary
of State to deal with. It is not unreasonable when we are spending
very large amounts of public money that there should be some degree
of scrutiny of the way in which the money is spent.
96. Secretary of State, it has been a good first
session. Thank you very much.
(Mr Clarke) I have enjoyed it too.
4 Note by witness: The target is to increase
the participation in higher education towards 50% by 2010. The
Autumn Performance Report notes that participation in 2001-02
was at least 41.5%. This figure does not take account of the likely
effect of revised population estimates from ONS. A figure of 43%
is estimated. Back
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